Commercial Spaceships Are Like 'Driving an iPhone,' New Astronaut Says

[Judi Lynn]

By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer | August 3, 2018 03:18pm ET

Nine astronauts have new travel plans aboard commercial space capsules, with their mission assignments announced earlier today (Aug. 3).

Five of those astronauts flew aboard the United States' last set of spacecraft to travel to the International Space Station (ISS), the space shuttles. But while the newly announced crews are excited to once again launch from Florida instead of Kazakhstan, they aren't very nostalgic for the hardware of the shuttles themselves.

During the press announcement of the new astronaut assignments, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine asked two veteran astronauts to compare their new rides to the shuttles they flew more than seven years ago. [NASA Announces First Astronaut Crews to Fly on Boeing and SpaceX Spaceships]

"With 40 years' difference in avionics and technology, we have squeezed a lot more into a smaller ship," said Chris Ferguson, who now works directly for Boeing on its Starliner program and who commanded the very last space shuttle flight, in 2011.

More:
https://www.space.com/41372-space-shuttle-compare-crew-dragon-starliner.html

[Xipe Totec]

1. Spam in a can

Like all Mercury flights, Faith 7 was designed for fully automatic control, a controversial engineering decision which in many ways reduced the role of an astronaut to that of a passenger, and prompted Chuck Yeager to describe Mercury astronauts as "Spam in a can".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Cooper

[lapfog_1]

2. The Shuttle was designed some 45 years ago

and was originally meant to be a prototype to try out new technologies like the "flying body" shape and the thermal tiles, etc

Budget cuts after the moon missions caused NASA administrators to push using the shuttle as a reusable and "cheap" method to achieve orbit...

The promised replacement ( The Space Plane ) never materialized.

[NickB79]

3. Scramjet and ramjet technology proved harder to perfect than we realized

We still don't have a reliable scramjet to this day

[lapfog_1]

4. yes... I know... I worked on it for NASA from 1989 to 1999 - n/t

[NickB79]

5. Damn, that's cool!

Sorry to come off as explaining something to someone who's clearly far more of an expert than I am

[lapfog_1]

6. if you view the video I posted here

you can see my work on it starting at 2:40 into the video.

I'm not in the picture but some of my co-workers are pictured there.