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I see they are using touch screens. What would they do if the screens froze?

Looks like there are some physical buttons underneath the touch screens. Not sure what they do, but hopefully they're used for important stuff.

I just watched one of the astronauts push buttons on the touch screen, and it's shocking how small the icons on the screen are relative to their fingers. I would not want to try to the hit the right icon while accelerating!

That seems like an unlikely failure scenario. But I imagine if that happened during launch they would pull the abort lever since that would be indicative of a significant failure. Later they and the engineers on the ground would work to control the vehicle either remotely or to fix the displays... or both. And probably abort to the ground as quickly as is reasonably possible.

If one freezes then use the other 3. If they all freeze let the autopilot do it's job.

I find it sort of weird to not have buttons in there: with all the vibrations you would think it's rather difficult to touch the exact control that you want. I guess they considered that...

The exact same thing applies to buttons, its just harder to screw up. they also have buttons just fine

https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/04/03/photos-astronauts-trai...

I don't think the astronauts make extensive manual corrections during takeoff. And if you watch the livestream, the UI elements are much larger on the screen than would be possible with physical buttons. So if you are worried about precision, the touch screens would actually be safer.

I think the astronauts have very little to actually control. There are a variety of buttons underneath the screens, a big red one being for abort.

And what happens during launch when — I assume — everything starts vibrating wildly? They better be enormous virtual buttons.

They stare at them while waiting for the automatic launch sequence that has been in use by rockets since the early space race.

Actually I remember reading an article mentioning that they use vibration data from accelerometters to slightly shift content on thescreen, thus preventing the screen from appearing blurry to the crew during the launch. Pretty clever. :)

But indeed, the launch is automated and for any the few important manual thing (basically just manual launch abort trigger) they have separate physical controls.

I'm curious what the physical buttons on the seat armrests do.

When they were doing comm checks I noticed that they were being pressed right before the astronauts would talk.

ctrl+alt+del

Houston, we have a sad-mac.

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