Man’s Place in Spaceplane Flight Operations: Cockpit, Cargo Bay, or Control Room?

This paper begins to investigate the question: “What is the proper role of humans in the operation of a military Spaceplane?” All too often, the question boils down to: “Should it be manned or unmanned?” While it’s true that some man-machine interface types require a man on-board and some don’t, this manned/unmanned oversimplification skews the true context of the issue. Therefore, this paper seeks to put man’s role in military Spaceplane flight operations into a more proper perspective. Each of the paper’s three objectives is achieved. The first objective is to summarize the current literature which is best characterized as a “manned vs. unmanned” debate. Although existing evidence suggests a manned spaceplane configuration provides maximum mission flexibility and an unmanned configuration will result in a more economical program, other factors such as flight safety and program development risk are more difficult to pin down. Neither the manned nor unmanned argument is clearly compelling, and the debate appears to be at a stalemate. The second objective is to approach the problem from a different perspective by considering an entire spectrum of man-machine interface possibilities. A generic process is presented where specific mission tasks are mapped to optimum man-machine interface choices by considering such factors as performance, cost, schedule, and risk. Viewed in this context, the optimal man-machine interface for a military Spaceplane is shown to be the result of an iterative design process and not a pre-specified system requirement.