Is It Possible to Fly A Rocket To Space Without Autopilot?
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- čas přidán 6. 07. 2021
- Hundreds of missions have flown humans to orbit over the last 60 years, and while every one has had a pilot in command, none of them have actually had the pilot taking manual control of the ascent into orbit. In the early rockets this wasn't even possible, but the Apollo program and Space shuttle both had a backup capability which allowed limited manual control of the vehicle during the critical launch phase.
However, for suborbital flights there's over a dozen pilots who flew to space and back without a computer to guide them. - Věda a technologie
I still hope Virgin Galactic offers Joe Engle to fly at least one SpaceShipTwo mission. He is currently the only person to have flown two different winged craft to space (X-15 and Space Shuttle;) time to make him the third, and basically guarantee he retains the "most different types of winged spacecraft" crown for the foreseeable future.
I agree, but he’s getting a little old
@@thor8093 I’m figuring something along the lines of ceremonial copilot, since there are two pilots for SS2.
@@AnonymousFreakYT you can't just take one of the crewmembers away though. he'd have to either to the level of a pilot (not gonna happen) or ride in the back
@@AnonymousFreakYT would still be great in the back though
Sure, why not?
"this could rip of the wings of the space shuttle and really ruin the day"
Scott Manley teaching "mild understatements".
"Oh bother!"
The crew would definitely experience a significant emotional event.
The missile knows where it is- by knowing where it isn’t
The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation.
@@davidm8030
I met a docent at the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville a couple years ago who worked on the Apollo guidance system for IBM in the 60s. Cool guy.
Ahh yes, the Missile
@@davidm8030 I'm flashing back to Venn Diagrams for some reason...
If only humans could do that
00:40 are you saying that KSP players have more experience in getting rockets to space than astronauts? Got it!
Thats actually probably true. The astronauts are trained for emergencies, but have no experience. They dont do calculations, they dont design the rocket, they dont pilot it.
@@sonicsupersam7793 The only bar they have higher really is that their lives and government budget is reliant on their impeccable performance. Not much really. 🙄
/s obvs 😂
@@fcgHenden their impeccable performance doing what though? Sure, they flip some pretty important switches but with a bit of training anyone can.
@@sonicsupersam7793 Not becoming an ill mess after some Gs.
@@sonicsupersam7793 in terms of emergency preparedness, experience, and training, astronauts probably still have a better grasp than KSP players. Both go through some form of simulation, but it's the astronaut that gets to do it in a full-scale mock-up with both fully functional and simulated components.
In the documentary film "In the Shadow of the Moon" Gene Cernan talked about how he was tempted to go to manual and be the only man to fly a Saturn V by hand. He figured it was the last Apollo mission, anyway, worse that could happen was that he'd get fired after getting back from the moon. But he decided to play it straight and let the machine do its job.
Imagine his resume: The person who drove the most powerful everything in the history of vehicles.
Which doesn't mean there can't be any stronger engines, but none that have been flown by hand.
LOL, he said "I dared that computer to fail"
@@barryaiello3127 lol, all that training, and what you ended up being ? a baby-sitter for the computer.
that's why I'm a programmer, I create and use the computer, not the other way around.
@@monad_tcp The Saturn V launch computer provided several important functions difficult if not impossible for a man to emulate. It monitored all 5 engines and if bad trouble arouse it could launch the capsule escape system and destroy the rocket. It provided pinpoint guidance and would gimball the engines to keep it on it's needed trajectory. Highly doubt your a programmer either, programmers don't "create" hardware, they write code for it.
@Andrew Onymous You sound like you understand code, the guy I responded to didn't. The space shuttle would have never flown if not for the computers it uses, close to impossible to fly her at the correct decent angle without them.
After a long time manually controlling spacecrafts in KSP, I ended up using MechJeb for the mundane tasks like circularizing orbits and such.
And i agree with you, i consider this is not cheating
One of these days I ought to learn to use mechjeb...
kOS or bust.
Same. I do it manually first, to prove to myself that I can do it, then MJ to speed things up because I know what I'm doing.
I still go to space, dock, and land manually though because that's the fun part for me.
@@vector824 I do it all (ascent, circularization, docking) first myself (though for docking, I do need the Docking Port Alignment Indicator, and RCS Build Aid), but the procedure is all manual. And then once I get MJ and the appropriate modules, I just let it handle everything (though I still keep an eye on things, obvs).
Landing, I still do myself because I still haven't nailed the fine art of calling my LZ.
"How Apollo Flew to the Moon" by W. David Woods also mentions the manual first stage control option on page 73:
"Later in the mission, Conrad laughed about the experience. ``The launch was
almost as good as me getting to fly the Saturn V into orbit.'' His was only the second
Saturn equipped to allow the commander to fly manually to orbit - a contingency
that, while never called upon, would have been welcomed by the hot-shot
commanders within the astronaut corps."
Talk about that one time Abort to Orbit was used on Space Shuttle!
Please!
operation "pregnant chewing gum"
I think he already did but next time say please.
im sure ive heard scotty talk about that before....
Wait… what?
That Saturn V "cheat code" is one of my favorite tidbits about that rocket. Pretty sure Von Braun would have shot any astronaut who thought about even simulating it, though.
That doesn't sound like his department.
I'm going to make a Space Plane passenger flight company named SAFE, that way I get free advertisement from Scott Manley at the end of every one of his videos.
"Fly Safe"
and then everyone watches all those KSP videos of him "flying safe" and decides they'd better find an alternative. "Fly SAFE, nobodies space planes has more struts than ours !!! " "I flew SAFE, and all I got for it was this T-shirt... and heart palpitations"
Space Adventure For Everyone
KSP may make you confident, but STS never came with a "Revert to Launchpad" button.
True lol. I've lost control of so many Shuttles on reentry in RSS. Always get the time wrong to lower the nose into the wind.
Astronauts are thankful they never had to fly RTLS.
Yeah, for me, getting to orbit without STS is basically "you will not go to space today".
@@mkelly0x20 I can think of many ways you could get to space without STS. lel
@@mkelly0x20 what's sts?
Beginner Kerbonauts: “It’s really difficult”.
Professional Kerbonauts: “It’s still difficult”.
Not-caring Kerbonauts: MechJeb.
@@DanSlotea We call those "cheaters". Dunno if you're familiar with the word :P
@@andersjjensen If you want to perform manual orbital maneuvers, the it's technically cheating.
Outside of that, it's just like the guidance computers that real life spacecraft use for adjusting their orbit/trajectory, where all you need to do is set the parameters for your next maneuver and click "Execute".
@@andersjjensen To me, mech jeb is no fun, and I’d rather fly manually. Unless of course I’m doing injection burns in an SSTO; then I might use the new feature that creates the transfer maneuvers for you.
never done Kerbal. In Doctor Martin Schweiger's Orbiter space flight simulator. I've flown to orbit HUNDREDS of times.
Scott, this presentation was "pitched" at just the right level for geeks like us. Very nicely done.
Yeah, I didn't roll my eyes or yaw(n) even once! Scott really accelerates the learning process, without being a jerk. And, yes, I've been told my sense of humour is a real slow burn.
@@Ryan_Thompson That's some real pro grade space humour.
LoL
I've also heard interviews with Gene Cernan where he said he was ready to fly Apollo 17 to orbit manually if necessary. He seems to have trained on a procedure to do this.
Cernan said in hist book that he was daring the rocket to need manual intervention all the way to orbit.
@@JohnBare747 Imagine manually controlling a rocket to orbit LMFAO.
@@sixforks6543 Cernan would earn his money going manual
I have read a paper (coming out of the Inst Lab I believe) discussing whether this would work; I believe that it 'killed' about 80% of the crews who tried it in sim. I'll see if I can find the reference.
@@davidmoser3535 no doubt!
"Hello it's Scott Manly here." (Extra deep and Manly voice)
Hullo*
*Manley
@@FuncleChuck You're mistaken, it is now known as the Manly voice.
*Manley
@@RastaPilot737... Woosh
Yet it is.
Just remember to make a lot of quick saves.
Wow, that vibration at 11:52 looks brutal! Of course, looked like it didn't even phase the Spaceship 1 pilot.
edit: Changed X-15 to SS1 (thanks, JDD!)
That's Spaceship 1, not X-15, notice the multiple round windows.
Check out the external view of that flight. Very nearly lost control a couple of times. Spaceship Two is a lot more stable but still pretty wobbly when they first light the engine and pull up.
'faze' is the word. Just saying
@@user-lv7ph7hs7l I think Spaceship 1 had a control issue that didn't get worked out, there being only two flights before it was retired. I do remember the awesome footage of Mike Melville dumping M&Ms through the cockpit while he was in zero-G.
@@-danR With that kind of shaking he might have been phased too.
Scott Crossfield was the test pilot on the X15. Although he never went to space, he helped design the X15, because not only was he a hell,of a pilot he was a brilliant engineer. He also smacked Esther Williams' "beautiful derriere" once as a joke (she thought it was funny...Scott's wife not so much).
Crossfield wasn't that great of an Engineer
@E Van did u work with him?
@E Van damn I wish I could say the same thing about all of my coworkers.
@Samurai Nuts
Many of those who were in the X Program and in the Astronaut Corps have written in books that Crossfield was what I said, and some said it a lot Stronger. He was even a PITA for Frank Borman at Eastern Airlines, and there was some Maneuvering done to send him Packing
Crossfield died when is single engine aircraft broke up in a storm over Georgia.
The Saturn V guidance turned out to be rather more resilient than expected; Apollo 6 lost two engines in second stage flight, and Skylab had a bunch of pieces fall iff, and both continued on to orbit quite handily. So the need for manual intervention was even less likely.
The two outboard, adjacent engine fail case was supposed to be uncontrollable and during Apollo 6 the ground expected the vehicle to LOC when the engine failures occurred. What actually happened is the two other outboard engines maxed out their control displacement and, wonder of wonders, the vehicle managed not to LOC, although it couldn't follow guidance any more and just went up in kind of a straight line. After staging,, the SIV-B was able to mostly make up for the second stage and got into orbit. I don't think you could get anybody to guarantee that that result was repeatable, however.
@@wepprop Oh sure. Both of those were waaaaay outside the envelope. I found a copy of the flight loop for Apollo 6 - the conversations between BOOSTER and Flight were pretty tense... (wish I could find that audio again)
@@JohnRineyIII any links to the audio?
@@zrspangle Unfortunately no, the site they were on disappeared years ago.
@@JohnRineyIII sad
Put it this way: Can you land on the moon, manually, yes you can : Neil Armstrong did it. Can you dock an out of control Gemini to Agena, manually, yes you can: Neil Armstrong did it, .. do you see where this is going?
Neil Armstrong also skipped a space plane off the atmosphere like a rock on a lake and back into space. The man was an absolute legend.
Yes. Can you calculate moon mission rendezvous path manually? Yes, you can - Katherine Johnson did it!
Neil Armstrong punched out of the Lunar Lander Simulator.
@Peter Evans BS
@Peter Evans All a union can do is threaten to strike. How is that going to prevent doing away with pilots?
You forgot that Tyrese did steer his car rocket into space and into the evil satellite in in Fast & the furious 9
Or the one who is driving a Tesla to mars right now.
I mean, since reality comes with MechJeb pre-installed, I wouldn't trust my life to anything biological during ascend either.
@Peter Evans I am not a pilot myself but as an avid watcher of Aircrash Investigation, I tend to disagree with you. Also, I didn't know there was only a single pilot union for the entire planet. Or are you American and think your country _is_ the planet?
@Peter Evans All a union can do is threaten to strike. How is that going to prevent doing away with pilots?
@Peter Evans if that's your argument then I imagine you're not too happy about the us national debt, largely held by China.
@Peter Evans The US isn't on a great track either. The Democracy is weakening, wealth and power are centralizing and the economy willl soon be surpassed by China. Meanwhile the British remenisce about the empire and the EU is as always busy with itself. China on the other hand is doing great economically and everyone wants to be friends with it. Who cares about democracy, human rights and liberty when you can have cheap consumer goods and labour.
@Peter Evans Nope, we still need pilots. During sunny skies when everyone is playing by the rules, sure, the computer does fine. But throw in an "unplanned midair rendezvous", turbulence, rain, crosswind, or any number of unplanned mechanical or electronic issues, and you'll be wanting that human.
Computers do really well when the variables are known. When the variables are unknown or, ya know, varying, humans do better. The physics of weather are one of the great challenges that stump even our greatest supercomputers.
Even with large scale weather systems like hurricanes, you can throw 20 supercomputers and hundreds of lifelong scientists at the problem, and all you get out of it is an educated guess. Small scale local weather is even harder to predict.
That's not even taking into account emergency landings. Those HAVE to be done by a human. You don't want a remote with latency and an unreliable radio connection telling the plane what surface to crash on top of.
0:34 I love that quote “the crew have important jobs to do, like flipping switches to keep the computer happy!!” 🖥 😊
And, more importantly, to not flip the wrong switches!
I did it Scott ! In the '80s Atari sold an expansion module for the 2600 model game, and another "game cart" with a shuttle simulator. This made you learn tons of things like yaw, pitch, roll, and firing and stopping different rockets and attitude jets within one second by the clock. You had to enter and exit the atmosphere at exact angles and speed and attitudes of the craft. Movements like the roll after launch were all required. It took me about 100 hours of practice to survive the first time, but when I did, the game displayed a contact person, he said I was either the first, or one of the first, and they sent me a "Space Shuttle" patch. I was proud ! By the way, no matter how much more I played that game, I never did better than about one success out of 4-5 attempts.
6:00 people can say what ever they want, but those slowmo close-up shots of the satur v are the best peaces of rocket videography out there. I'm not a big fan of the Apollo program, but those videos get never old. Hope Elon will do something similar with super heavy
Asking out of curiosity only, why not a fan of the Apollo program?
@@feralcapricorn5938 don't get me wrong. The project in it self was nothing short of a technological marvel. The effort by everyone involved was over the top. But I think it was done for all the wrong reasons. An propagandistic pr stunt. It could have been so much more than that and more sustainable if they have hade more time. On the other hand, the reasons chosen to justify then cost, where maybe the only reasons that would have come in consideration at this time.
@@grexursorum6006 Sticking it to the communists sounds like a pretty good reason to me. We had the budget for it, while they struggled. Perfection.
@@cortster12 … a peaceful world ahead….
It would also require several miracles to happen in quick succession.
But you know, space shuttle pilots had a lot of training in manifesting those.
These kind of Scott's lines are just gold
Sidenote: The revamped footage of the Saturn rockets is just....jaw dropping.
There are two tasks involved in guiding a rocket, first you have to keep it from falling over as it’s balancing on it’s tail, so you have to keep center of thrust aligned with center of mass, second you have to constantly adjust the pitch to fly the “gravity curve” into orbit, and finally you have to keep the velocity to within a few meters per second of the target to hit the window for orbital insertion. Highly unlikely a human could do this while experiencing 3-5 Gs of acceleration.
With the infamous words of Captain Zapp Brannigan: Give me a stick and I'll ride this bad boy to space!
With the infamous words of lieutenant Kiff Crocker: ughhh
She's built like a steakhouse, but handles like a bistro.
Love that you mentioned Cernan from the documentary In The Shadow Of The Moon. It’s one of the best Apollo documentaries ever made.
That movie has a strong healing effect on me. Soundtrack is amazing too!
Point worth mentioning, "us gamers" design in extra margin into our rockets so that we CAN pilot them to space with a slightly less than optimal trajectory (or sometimes entirely missing an SRB or side booster due to mishap).
There is no such designed in margin specifically for manual control in rockets that have flown to orbit IRL.
Have you seen the SmarterEveryDay episode that tours a rocket facility? The margin is so small, they literally shave fractions of a millimeter off of the rocket hulls to save weight. Those solid-looking rockets are so fragile, that they collapse under their own weight if they aren't "inflated" with fuel like the worlds most expensive water balloon.
@@r3dp9
EDIT: No I have not seen that episode, but I'm certain I know exactly what rocket stage they're talking about, because there's only one rocket stage currently being produced and flying that has such a fragile structure.
Original post:
Not all rockets or rocket stages are built so fragile.
The Space Shuttle and SLS solid rocket motor casings are solid high-strength low-alloy steel with a wall thickness of 2cm! That's thicker than the armor of some early WWII tanks! And the whole thing is that thick everywhere. Empty mass is on the order of 91 metric tons.
You picked the ONE example of a rocket stage that can't support it's own weight, which is the Centaur upper stage currently used on the Atlas V rocket, and soon to be used on the Vulcan Centaur rocket. That's a good example of a great upper stage, but the same thing that makes it an excellent upper stage is the one thing it does NOT share with 99% of the rest of the rocket stages of the world, specifically the "balloon tanks", so called because they have no bracing to save weight, and also to save weight they're so thin that like a balloon they can't support their own mass without having a higher pressure inside the tank than outside the tank.
I can't think of another rocket stage that currently uses balloon tanks, however early Atlas rockets also used balloon tanks (IIRC up to Atlas III but I'm not sure of that). Centaur was originally designed as an upper stage for Atlas, so they decided to make it like an Atlas of the period, which turned out to be a great idea.
Where you went wrong is taking the one example you have (Centaur with balloon tanks) and generalizing it to the entirety of all rockets that go to space (most rockets DO NOT have balloon tanks). The closest thing we have to a "standard" method of constructing rocket fuel tanks is called "isometric grid" construction, which refers to a specific arrangement of bracing ribs on the inside (or occasionally outside) of a rocket fuel tank or other pressure vessel that is expected to carry structural loads. Look at some pictures of the bare pressure vessel of the Orion capsule for an example of "isogrid with the ribs on the outside", and look at the inside of a Falcon 9 fuel tank for an example of "isogrid with the ribs on the inside" (1st or 2nd stage doesn't matter, they use the same machines to make both stages because that makes it cheaper to make).
Isogrid is pretty much the standard way to make aluminum alloy fuel tanks for liquid fueled rockets, because outside of the absolute ragged edge of performance, balloon tanks are just a pain in the butt to deal with on the ground, and as an example of how much of a pain in the butt they are, there was in fact an early Atlas rocket that was carrying a classified payload that was lost before it could even be fueled up on the pad, because a leak happened in the balloon tanks.
And if you want to talk SRBs that aren't derived from those used on the Space Shuttle, most of those these days have a carbon-fiber filament-wound or graphite-epoxy casing, which is quite strong indeed because it has to withstand the high pressure inside the SRB when firing, and also support the mass of the solid fuel adhering to the casing, and carry the structural loads induced by the usually quite high thrust of solid rocket motors (SRBs are great at giving a rocket a really big push for a relatively short time, which is typically used to get a larger rocket off the pad and above most of the atmosphere so the rocket's own more efficient engines on its own stages can push it into space over a longer period of time).
"what kind of emergency situation could possibly benefit from human intervention?" Good question...
The current rule in America.
On spaceships only? Or in general? Cause I can think of a rather big aviation related one right off the bat... MCAS failure on a 737MAX... Best hit them stab trim cutout switches pretty quick. Then you trim it back into something reasonable using the hand wheels.
Anyone interested can download the space shuttle crew operations manual and the entry and TAEM manuals and read up on all the contingencies including the RTLS about.
Yes! ❤ Wonderful reading. And includes the following choice quote:
WARNING
It is very easy to overshoot maximum drag
while flying high energy entries. It is better
to be high energy at TAEM interface than
to be at TAEM interface without wings.
from my experience in ksp, yes, yes it is. it just doesn't end well.
By far one of my favorite videos Scott. Thanks.
Amazing video as usual! Thanks Scott!
Nice review Scott. Flying the shuttle orbiter during ascent was tricky in the sim, and we considered it doubtful in real life. Lots of RTLS maneuvers were practiced, some successfully, but few thought it could be done for real. The aerodynamics of hypersonic flight at that (relatively low) altitude consisted of just a few data points.
Nice timing, Curious Marc video on Saturn V LVDC internals also came out today.
I had to watch this video twice. I got so caught up with the beautiful imagery I was not listening to Scott's voice!
Great video again Scott.
Thanks Scott, brilliantly informative as usual.
Imagine what it must be like to literally feel the air getting thinner as you reach space. When you are flying the old fashioned way, you can feel the air around you through the controls. When you fly by cable, you get to feel the air around you. It's kind of hard to explain, but you just know what the interaction between the aircraft and air is doing.
This has already been a problem when aircraft approached high mach numbers in long spindly aircraft, the plane basically began feeling very floppy, especially along the roll t yaw axis, sometimes resulting in loss of control
@@dsdy1205 And that is exactly how the sound barrier got it's name as people thought it was literally a barrier that you could never pass
@@Sir_Uncle_Ned I wasn't talking about transonic loss of control. this issue was called inertia coupling and it was encountered at speeds of Mach 2+, long after they had conquered the sound barrier.
EDIT: a slight clarification, this isn't encountered at Mach 2 speeds, it's encountered in early mach 2 capable aircraft that didn't have enough control surface area, at any speed. But it still serves as a good analog for how a plane behaves in progressively thinner air
@@dsdy1205 huh. TIL
just got to the Mun with my 4yr old for the first time, she was in charge of staging. :D
she likes to drive around in vehicles, mostly "swimming" in the sea.
Ahh, just like half of my planes
Thank-you very much Scott. This is one of your best.
Great topic and video, Scott!
Hey Scott, do you have a video explaining the basics of orbital mechanics? I’ve seen little bits about it in your videos but I would love a foundation of how speed and altitude and attitude relate to each other once in orbit. Thanks.
"Computers have always done a better job"
And that's why want to download Mechjeb so it can do a better job at holding my space craft better than I could with my inputs
A really great episode that underscores the extent to which most space flight has been automated, rather than manually controlled.
Great info and lots of shuttle footage I haven’t seen before! 🥰
it is also worth noting that Frederick “CJ” Sturckow is a 4-time Shuttle Astronaut (2 of which as Commander) before he joined Virgin Galactic and flew SS2
Hi Scott, was listening in to your twitch stream last night when you were discussing this and the X-15 plane!
By the way the X-15's were, in fact, rockets and did go into space (for altitude runs 90 and 91) and were piloted by astronauts with minimal or no analog computer control. They would be a counter-example to Scott's final assertion. It's the technical definition of "astronaut" that you fly above the Karman line.
And cosmonauts?
Some fantastic footage I've never seen before !
You give the most detailed but simply explained information about anything
If rocket scientists designed airplanes, pilots would be deemed too irresponsible to perform manual take off, as well 🤣
If airplanes broke up during rotation, if your rotation rate were high or low by 20 percent, I would want the autopilot to take off as well. Airplanes are way more forgiving than rockets.
4:39 I recognize those monoprop thrusters. =)
I really appreciate this video. There's alot of knowledge in it as well as a feeling of deep seated confidence in the capabilities of mankind even steering our way to space. Thank you for sharing Scott.
This is some beautiful footage! ❤️
That "pilot to space" aspect of unmodded KSP is really my least favorite thing about the game. Some people love that part, but it breaks the immersion for me.
Try installing RO or RP1. Flying a rocket yourself is the exception not rule with these mods.
Trying to get some working SSTO just by tweaking your overengineered construct...
Scottish Accent: "Landin' on tha' Mun" - Kerbal Space Program must have been written by a Scotsman!
Nice work, Scott!
And those Saturn V launch videos ... oh, they take me back to my youth, watching on television as they lifted off from the Cape!
Interesting subject, excellent presentation! Thanks Scott.
As far as I remember, in that Voskhod 2 mission (when Aleksey Leonov first "leonovized" in the outer space) Pavel Belyaev had to perform a manual descent to land due to a malfunction...
And they landed in an area so remote that it took hours for recovery helos to spot them.
I like how the kerbal in the intro seems to start panicking as the camera moves closer, as if he can see it rapidly approaching his face
He is not "panicking" ... he's sitting in a GAY rocket and you know what Kerbal no.2 does behind him ...lolololol
thanks fot the great work! Great research!
This is such a cool video! Thank you for making it. Those spaceplane pilots are real fliers, no doubt. It hadn't occurred to me that they're the modern inheritors of the X-15, but of course you're totally right.
Deke Slayton wasn't going to allow a fully automated shuttle.
For those who have not watched it, The Right Stuff comes highly recommended.
When We Left Earth - ten part docuseries about the space race - is better.
Spam in a can.
Excellent Scott, really interesting and educational :)
Footage here is just wild. Never get tired of seeing the Saturn V launch. And that shuttle ascent profile is nuts! Thing is turning and it's barely off the pad!
You will like this " Ultimate Saturn V Launch with Enhanced Sound " on the channel " Starship Trooper "
Gene Cernan said he trained to pilot the SV to space in an emergency.
Don’t forget that time that Tommy Lee Jones landed the flying brick on manual.
Loved that movie. Realistic or anything? Probably not so much, but I still enjoyed the hell out of watching it. And I love realism, especially in space stuff.... But if it's fun and you enjoy it, that still trumps everything else in my book as far of favorite movies and whatnot. Just like life, if you don't have fun (and you aren't hurting anyone while doing it of course)... What's the point!? 🤔😁 Have a wonderful weekend y'all!! ❤️
I think the push is to break the operation of a spacecraft into discrete components like undock, return to earth etc. and you select what you want from a menu on a screen. The reason for the push for this is so every scientist we send to space doesn't also have to be a Joe Engle. Everyone who wants to go to space doesn't necessarily want to be a pilot too. Thats a lot of learning for one individual. I would love to see a Dragon or Starship simulator program I can buy and train myself.
Wow, this video is awesome! You have many, many small video clips of space vehicles, which I've never seen before.
Valentina Tereshkova was not a qualified airplane pilot at the time she went into orbit, and I doubt she would have been allowed to learn afterwards. Obviously she was qualified with Vostok but I'm not sure that's what we'd normally consider "piloting."
I understand the X-20 program did some research into this and decided the pilot could bring it to orbit, but of course that never flew.
If and when mass commercial space travel becomes a reality, 'astronaut wings' should be reserved for trained crew. We don't get 'pilot wings' for sitting in an air-plane cabin as passengers, and space tourists shouldn't either if they don't have a training equal to the crew and would be capable of operating the craft if necessary.
@Peter Evans Strange how powerful the labour unions seem to some people - more powerful than aerospace industry giants and major airlines. To build a fully independent, unmanned military airplane - not just a remote operated or a semi-autonomous drone - is a task which even now is grappled with, and not fully solved, by US airspace industry. We simply can't yet build unpiloted,. fully autonomous airliners which would have a great safety record. And when we will build them, any accident with them will hit customer confidence and delay transition by years, if not decades.
@Peter Evans Big bad labour unions stopped airplane manufacturers and airlines from introducing pilotless airliners in 1996? Sure.... sure... Pull the other one.
@Peter Evans That Earth is flat & 6000 years old, and that Sun orbits it, and all-powerful labour unions control everything - that kind of things?
As a drone pilot, "fly safe" has good meaning. Fascinating footage behind your fascinating dialogue. 😃
Outside of being in the IMAX Theater located at NASA Cape Kennedy Visitor Center, this humble little video features the greatest reel of historic space launch footage in the known universe. Juxtaposing Scott's calm narration regarding specific NASA pilot protocols with epic space vehicle action shots makes it all so much sweeter. Pro Tip: play this on the biggest screen you got.
I just wanna know what Scott's shirt says!
For STS-2, the backup CDR, Ken Mattingly told his SMS team he intended to fly every ascent sim manually. That lasted about two hours out of a four hour ascent simulation lesson. Not one of the runs in those two hours ran more than 30 seconds. He couldn't fly the roll program successfully in manual, not even by following the needles, let alone with no computer guidance. Not that he didn't try - he tried his hardest. But every run the SMS froze because some limit had been exceeded. After that, all crew training for manual control was limited to second stage, after the SRB's had separated.
"Ken's in the sim"
...
"They dont know how to do it"
"If you haven't flown your craft into orbit manually and without a computer, YOU'RE CRAP!" -- Space Camp Drill Sargeant, mid-21st century
big scott manley, you are my favorite space explainer youtuber, you have helped my learn so much about space and i would like to say thank you scott. i wish to meet you someday.
Never been this fast. Love your videos :D
"...over a dozen pilots who have flown an *aircraft* into space by hand." The operative word being 'aircraft' that have crossed an arbitrary line into space on a parabolic trajectory... i.e. no expectation of an orbit. The orbit is the tricky part, as we have all discovered on KSP.
I wouldn't say so, once you have a suborbital trajectory and enough deltav performing the circularization burn is pretty easy
@@78tx
…if you’re playing stock.
This is such a great video!
Great shots. Many I had never seen
Idk without SAS I usually just flip before I'm out of the atmosphere.
I disable SAS for large spacecraft because they go into resonance and shake themselves apart
@@thenasadude6878 something something moar struts
Scott really aiming for that new audience with all the Chinese references
Go where rhe money is I guess. Now that China has blown it out of thr water recently, it seems every minute detail of the CCP program now is of interest to western audiences. I'm not hating though, unbeknownst to the vast majority obviously, space is a global, collaborative effort but unfortunately us Earthlings have mostly only really approached it from the competitive angle, and it shows. We should all give interest to the global effort.
Or maybe he's just trying harder to be fair? So much bias is taken for granted and passes without comment.
Landing the Space Shuttle manually is really bad ass.
superb content, exactly what I subscribed for🤗
Scott is cool!
Anyone can pilot a spaceship into space. Only a skilled pilot can do it twice
Does that mean I can
Best channel by far.
How good are those Saturn V pad and Shuttle on-board camera shots!
"Mad" Mike Hughes did a manual takeoff on February 22, 2020.
The landing was facial.
Flat earthers around the world mourned his death.
Then that big ol' flat earf hit him like a giant flyswatter.
Damn you can be a literal astronaut and for some people that's still not good enough 😅
Weird it's almost like most of the world doesn't recognize 82km as space
"I'm Scott Manley, fly safe. And by fly safe, I mean let the autopilot do it because it's better at it than you are."
So much legendary footage.
Thanks, to mechjeb.
... Houston, I'm taking manual control
Talking about the early astronauts, the X planes and Neil Armstrong being a test pilot. Reminded me of the awesome film... The Right Stuff.
This film is well worth a watch if you haven’t seen it, one of my favourite space films.
Hi Scott, As always a very informative and entertaining video. Thanks for posting. Regarding the X-15, you state "..the X-15 program ended in 1963." In actuality, the last X-15 flight took place on October 1968. Fly safe.