Space Shuttle Gains Remote-Control Landing Capability

rufey writes "An article over at Space.com mentions two new tools that Space Shuttle Discovery will have aboard during its upcoming flight, designated STS-121, scheduled to lift off on July 1, 2006. One tool is for tile repair. The other tool is a 28-foot-long cable that would be used to connect an avionics bay located on the mid-deck with the flight-deck controls. The cable enables flight controllers on the ground to land the Shuttle completely by remote control, including the ability to lower the landing gear. The remote control landing would be used in the case where the Shuttle was damaged to the point that it would be too risky to land it with humans aboard, but could be landed without humans aboard in an attempt to save the vehicle. The astronauts would take refuge on the ISS while mission control in Houston attempt to land a damaged Shuttle."

Comments

Buran

[CommunistHamster]

IIRC, The soviet space shuttle Buran (Snowstorm) had remote landing capabilities from the start of the project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Buran

Re:Buran

[Bitsy Boffin]

Buran's first and only orbital flight was entirely unmanned, I'm not sure if that was remote control or pre-programmed flight plan though. I think the latter.

Shuttle Orbiter Automatic Landing

[coobird]

The Shuttle Orbiter already has automatic landing capabilities. Although the system has never been used all the way to touchdown, the Orbiter does make most of its trip back to the ground on autopilot until the commander takes over of the controls as it nears landing.

Re:Shuttle Orbiter Automatic Landing

[dpilot]

The reasoning I heard was that opening the doors for the landing gear cannot be un-done.

Remember, this is 70's technology. At the time, they were more afraid of computer glitches than they were of pilot error. The systems in the shuttle can open the doors for the landing gear, but they can only be closed with ground equipment. (saves weight) Any sort of computer glitch affecting the landing gear doors, and they're stuck on-orbit with 3 big holes in the bottom of the craft and no way to close them. FWIU, the landing gear doors have been the only completely manually-operated part of the shuttle.

Decent reasoning, for the time. I suspect we're a little more comfortable with computer control, now.

Landing gear

[MichaelSmith]

The last I heard the landing gear release was a simple manual switch with no connection to the flight control system. TFA describes the new cable as a "Data Cable" so there must also be a new connection between a computer system and the landing gear switch.

Its strange that this was not mentioned in the article. Perhaps this change was made earlier?

Oh and BTW I am still reading the apollo 17 ALSJ and much is made of the exploding foam incidents on apollo 16 and 17. The stuff was literally rocketing up into the sky around the LM during both missions. You would think that somebody would think (foam == bad) as a part of the lessons learnt from apollo. Drilling holes in the stuff is clearly not enough.

Re:Filling the ISS over capacity a good idea?

[MichaelSmith]

I think we have to accept that, in space flight, humans are not safe

Humans were safer flying apollo. The full apollo stack had three totally independent pressurised environments (CM, LM and pressure suits). Even the pressure suits had two independent air and cooling systems. The heat shield was only exposed immediately before use and by design it was a lot stronger than the shuttle TPS.

It was a bloody good system. Comparable in reliability to the life support systems used in scuba diving. And it had heaps of redundancy. Even in the near disaster of apollo 13 I can think of half a dozen things which the crew might have tried if their work arounds failed.

The shuttle has a bad architecture, and current efforts at fixing it are working against the original design.

Re:Why the gear is manually extended

[Detritus]

The real issue is that the shuttle could not survive a reentry with the landing gear deployed. Deploying the landing gear destroys the integrity of the thermal protection system, and there is no capability to retract the landing gear in flight.

Airline autoland systems

[Kombat]

My brother is an airline pilot. A Kat C procedure lets a modern airliner basicly land fully automatic (sight below 150ft.). However, if the weather conditions allow it they will land that damn thing by hand just for the fun of it (and for not to loosing training, it's said that older pilots have particularly problems flying manually because some of them get out of training due to too much auto-piloting).

Wow. This is an example of a little information being a dangerous thing.

First of all, it's called a "Category III ILS Precision Approach", not a "Kat C procedure. It requires 3 criteria to all be in place in order to be attempted. The landing facility must be equipped, certified, and current. The airplane must be equipped, certified, and current. And the pilot-in-command attempting the approach must be certified and current for Cat III approaches.

Secondly, it is not a routine landing. Not all runways at all airports are equipped with Cat III ILS. Airlines make a lot of flights to smaller airports that just have the basic Cat I or II ILS systems, or even localizer-only, ADF, or VOR non-precision approach guidance systems. Pilots land "by hand" almost all the time. The "auto-lands" are the rare occurences, and they are required to do them every so often to keep current.

Landing the space shuttle is very, very different from landing an airliner. The glideslope is ridiculously steep. There is no second chance. The shuttle is practically plummetting at between 6000 - 8000 feet per minute (normal aircraft descent at around 500 feet per minute when on approach for landing). The shuttle enters the approach pattern at over 35,000 feet. If it needs to do a 360 degree turn, it will lose over 30,000 in altitude. It has an absolutely horrible glide ratio. Its glideslope angle is 20 degrees (normal glideslope angle is 3 - 5 degrees). It comes in at almost 300 mph (waaaay too fast for any other normal aircraft). It truly is a very special aircraft.