My Fox News column got some email response, which regurgitated the standard conventional “wisdom.”

Stephanie Crowe writes:

You make a point that if pilots were not needed Fed Ex would not be using them. I think that there are a few issues that keep pilots flying Fed Ex Planes. a) liability risk, b) unions, and c) pre and post flight taxiing.

Well, no. The primary reason is that the FAA requires it, and if you ask Fred Smith, I think that he would himself be leery of roboticizing his aircraft, regardless of what the union thinks.

I will agree somewhat with (a). To the degree that liability risk is there, it’s because it’s a real risk. There’s no evidence that a totally-automated aircraft would be safer, from a third-party standpoint, than the current system. There may be some time in the future in which that becomes the case, but it isn’t even in sight right now.

For NASA the liability risk is small as all flights are over water.

This is irrelevant because a) the proposed vehicle will not (necessarily) be operated by NASA (and if it is, it’s unlikely that it will operate much more cheaply than Shuttle, so there’s no point in spending billions of dollars developing it), and b) there’s no reason to suppose that it will only operate over water. Finally, this argument utterly ignores the fact that reliability is very important in a reusable vehicle, regardless of what’s happening on the ground below–these things will be expensive. Anything that can enhance it (including the use of human pilots) will be employed.

There is however a considerable “union” pressure from the astronaut corps to keep piloting crafts (I am reminded of a scene from “The Right Stuff” where the engineers are calling the vessel a capsule and the test subject are calling it a space craft). Taxing has never been an issue with space going craft. Unmanned rocket payloads have always had automated flight paths and the current Space Shuttle is effectively automated during launch. People are foolish (as a group) and like to see a person “in control” regardless of his actual authority.

Even if such a desire is “foolish,” the desire remains, and so will the pilot, if the vehicle is to be used as anything other than a Shuttle replacement. If it’s to be used only as that, then it’s a huge waste of money.

I agree that using a man safe certified system for ferrying cargo is foolish and I am glad it was stopped for whatever the reason. I have always though that there should be a three level certification process for space systems something maybe like this:

Shuttle is not a “man safe certified system.”

Man certified – capable of carrying human cargo (probability of failure 0.999999 or 6-9’s, although the current STS only has a demonstrated probability of failure of 0.99 or 2 9’s).
high value certified – capable of carrying high value instrumentation
(3-9’s)
low value certified – capable of carrying low value instrumentation,
fuel, food, …. (2-9’s)

Again, all of your “certification levels” (which currently don’t exist in any form, other than man rating, which is irrelevant to the current discussion–see this post which is the full-length version of my Fox News column, and expands greatly on this very subject), totally ignore the value of a reusable space transport itself. Hint: think hull insurance.

Robert Engberg writes:

I beg to differ with the notion in your article “Look Ma, no pilot” that a piloted vehicle would lower the cost and be more reliable than an unpiloted one. Ariane 5 is curently the most cost effective launch vehicle to place a satellite in LEO. It is entirely automated.

Note that he brings up an entirely irrelevant example. Ariane V is an expendable launch system. Putting a pilot in it would either increase costs tremendously, or it would be an oxymoron, unless the pilot were a kamikaze type. It doesn’t bring anything back, so it’s nonsense to talk about piloting it. The fact that it’s the most effective (that’s only because its development was subsidized largely by the French government) doesn’t make it good in any absolute sense. The reason that SLI exists is to, ostensibly, dramatically reduce the cost of access to orbit, and eventually put things like Ariane out of business.

As were every scientific space probes to all the planets in our solar system.

Again, this example has zero relevancy, for the same reasons. It was unaffordable to put people on those probes (though we’d have no doubt learned much more if we had). The argument isn’t that automation can’t be done, if essential–it’s that it’s not the best way to operate a reusable transportation system.

And with the exception of docking, lowering the landing gear, and deploying the drag chute, the space shuttle can launch and land automatically.

Yes, it can. And the Shuttle costs half a billion dollars per flight. I’m not arguing that we can’t build a fully-automated space transport. I’m simply arguing that this is not the road to low cost, as his examples demonstrate much more eloquently than I could.

Even the cash strapped Russians had an automated launch and landing of their version of a space shuttle back in 1988. No cosmonauts.

That’s because they made the mistake, taking NASA’s lead, of building an all-up system with no incremental flight testing. Again, cash-strapped or not, the system was ultimately unaffordable. That suggests that they may have made a bad design decision in building such a thing in the first place (which was largely a copy of the Shuttle).

With astronauts and pilots, they of course require training, salaries, etc. not to mention the added complexity of environmental, control, and life support systems to the launch vehicle. The automated GNC technology for launching and landing spacecraft has been around for decades.

These are not significant expenses in the context of the total program. And the automated GN&C technology for taking off and landing aircraft has been around for decades as well. But for some reason, those philistines and luddites at the FAA and the airlines still insist on putting pilots in the cockpit. The airliner industry is extremely mature, but they still think pilots are important. But you argue that in a new type of vehicle (a reusable space transport), never successfully built before, that we can do without them. What’s wrong with this picture?

As such, the reasons for having a manned (sorry, “crewed”) launch vehicle are more political and psychological than technical and economical. Who would have really cared if a lunar probe had landed on the moon?

More irrelevancy. We’re not talking about humans as payloads–we’re talking about humans as pilots of vehicles that you want to get back, routinely and reliably.

(Actually, it already had by the time Neil Armstrong stepped on the lunar surface.) As for Fed Ex wanting automatic planes, well, Fed Ex is not in the risky, expensive business of developing commercial aircraft. Most commercial aircraft business is to airlines, which carry passengers, and not many passengers would want to fly in planes with no human pilot.

Yes, and they will want that even more in something as unfamiliar as a space transport.

Even flight attendants were originally put in planes by airlines to attract more male bread-winner passengers, since if they saw young women flying in planes, they reasoned that it must be pretty safe.

Yes, and much the same thing will happen to sell space passenger travel.

Earth to orbit flight is one of those things that for now is barely possible.

Nonsense. It’s routine. The only thing that’s difficult is doing it affordably, because very little effort has gone into developing markets large enough to make that possible.

The main challenges are finding a suitable energy and propulsion system and developing suitable materials that can survive such extreme changes in aerodynamic loads and temperature.

No, the main challenges are overcoming stale Cold-War notions like the ones above, and raising the financing for a viable commercial vehicle. And my prediction is that when this occurs, it will be piloted. The technology is the easy part.