Computer May Be NASA Pilot of Future

Space pilots, long the masters of powerful machines that fly into Earth orbit, are nervously facing a future in which they may go the way of elevator operators.

In a controversial departure from tradition, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is planning a new generation of launch vehicles that are likely to be controlled in large part by computers.

The reusable space vehicles, part of the X-33 program under development at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, probably will not even have a cockpit, a window or a control stick, according to design engineers.

Called the Venture Star by Lockheed Martin, the new vehicles might very well carry shuttle scientists and other passengers to the international space station in the next decade. But the people would sit inside a cargo compartment.

Astronauts, taking a dim view of this development, assert that no computer could replace the skill and judgment of a human pilot. Any future spacecraft carrying passengers, they insist, should also have pilots in direct control.

“The astronaut corps thinks there is always a place for humans,” said Robert “Hoot” Gibson, a veteran of five space shuttle flights and a former Navy test pilot. “It is far easier for a problem to fool a computer than a crew.”

NASA executives insist that the knotty question of humans versus computers is still open--although they acknowledge that a pilot and a cockpit resembling that of the current space shuttle are out for the X-33.

Sensing the potential for controversy, NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin has directed officials at Lockheed Martin, the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and the Johnson Space Center in Houston to study the issue.

The X-33 program is heading in a direction that does not augur well for astronauts. The X-33 will be an unmanned prototype to demonstrate technology for a later, full-scale vehicle. Since the prototype is unmanned, the later vehicle is likely to operate the same way.

“People will not be flying the bird with a stick and rudder, but they will be on the outer control loop,” said Gary Peyton, program director for reusable launch vehicles at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Exactly what the “outer control loop” means is not yet clear, but no doubt it will not allow humans on board the spacecraft to wrest control from computers.

The shuttle now has two pilots who sit in a cockpit with a stick and rudder, enabling them at any time during ascent or descent to assume direct control of the craft.

As they return to Earth, the pilots routinely take complete control from the computers at 50,000 feet and fly the spacecraft to a runway landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida or Edwards Air Force Base near Lancaster.

Beyond the purely technical issues, the X-33 debate creates an enormous problem for NASA: The public simply adores astronauts.

Every year astronauts are asked to make 8,000 public appearances, about four times as many as they can manage. Thousands of Americans flock to see the space shuttle take off and land.

Astronauts and engineers have been fighting each other at NASA ever since the Mercury program first sent men into space. Famed test pilot Chuck Yeager reportedly rejected becoming an astronaut, saying that he would be little more than “Spam in a can.”

But astronauts prevailed over the engineers in the Mercury program, winning a window and a panel of switches that allowed them to control various thrusters in the capsule. By the time of the Apollo moon-shot program, astronauts had a very real piloting role: ensuring that the ship was mated in space to the lunar lander and directly flying the lunar lander to the surface of the moon.

But engineers now dream of doing away not only with pilots but also with train engineers, subway conductors and perhaps even motorists. From the engineers’ point of view, the best vehicle is one completely controlled by computers.

That view has a lot of support.

“We used to have elevator operators, and we don’t have them anymore,” said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “To be simplistic about it, the shuttle will be like an elevator to the space station.”

The issues, Logsdon said, are whether robotics have matured sufficiently and whether NASA “needs pilots with silk scarves around their neck.”

But space expert John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, who contends that technology has not yet matured enough to eliminate pilots, said: “Even an elevator has a stop button. Don’t be quick to dismiss pilots.”

Even with the best computers, a spacecraft is a lot more difficult to automate than an elevator. Pilotless spy planes illustrate the problems. For three decades, the Defense Department has failed to build a fleet of reliable drone aircraft to conduct spy missions.

“They crash a lot,” Gibson said.

Indeed, Lockheed Martin’s Dark Star, a high-tech drone built for the Pentagon, crashed during a test flight in April, just a month after its first test flight. The Hunter, Predator and Pioneer drones also have had dozens of accidents.

With the X-33, Lockheed Martin engineers are facing a still tougher job: They must come up with a revolutionary type of rocket engine, a new type of heat protection system and a major advance in strong, lightweight structures. A cockpit with a window and a flight control system might complicate the entire job and detract from the goal of creating a launch system that would sharply reduce the cost of getting to space--the focus of the X-33 program.

“It’s a personnel carrier, but they [astronauts] won’t really fly it,” said Jerry Rising, the Lockheed Martin program manager. “They are not too happy with it.

“On the other hand, our opinion is that the only thing they [could] fly is the landing. After people spend days in space at zero [gravity], just the process of reentry and exposure to [normal gravity] can be disorienting. Our opinion is that an autonomous or automatic landing would be safer. I’m sure they would argue with that.”

Indeed they would. Norman E. Thagard, who flew aboard the shuttle and spent time on the Russian Mir space station, said he has observed situations when automated systems malfunctioned and humans had to intervene.

“If you have a pilot, it certainly gives you a better feeling,” said Thagard, now a professor at Florida State University.

“Our history and our heritage [say] you should have a human in the loop,” said former astronaut G. David Low. “It is going to be a long struggle before this happens.”