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Comment by peeters | Hacker News Reader

Bold choice on the touch screens. If there's any time you'd think you'd want unambiguous, tactile buttons it'd be when you have spine-wrenching vibrations coursing through your entire body and have 3 Gs pulling your arm back towards your body.

But I guess pretty much the only thing astronauts are potentially required to do during launch is abort, and they have the physical buttons for that. So maybe it's not actually an issue.

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Note the physical controls between the touchscreens; Musk specifically described those as tools for emergency launch/landing situations, where the touchscreens would be less usable.

I assume the touchscreens are for less urgent tasks, like plotting orbital changes and rendezvous.

There are some good reasons that NASA has avoided touchscreens, besides the ones pointed out here:

* Things tend to get loose in microgravity. You don't really want things floating into a touchscreen and performing unintended actions.

* During ascent and descent, it's incredibly hard (potentially impossible) to hold your hands out in front of you to operate something like that. The Orion has hand controllers next to each seat, which are notably lacking here.

Surely they would not be using a resistive touch screen for a dragon capsule? A modern (or enhanced) capacitive touch screen requires something like a human finger to act as a conductor for operation. That is how every modern smartphone and tablet work and why they suck with gloves on.

An approach used in some experimental aircraft touchscreens is to combine resistive and capacitative approaches, almost like the old BlackBerry Storm. You need to press down with a certain level of force to get the screen to register the click, but it won't be triggered by random objects.

These screens don't look like those screens, though. These look like capacitive touch screens on 27in monitors.

It's not easy to see just from looking at the displays. They may also have incorporated some sort of software-based delay, requiring the user to press down for a certain amount of time before a click is registered.

I doubt that SpaceX has not considered the implications of touch screens in space ships.

My recollection was that most people also hated the storm's touchscreen and that made it a pretty big flop.

It's a horrible solution for a smartphone touchscreen and the Storm had no other redeeming features. The needs in a cockpit are rather different, obviously.

I suppose it depends on the probability of a fault which could kill the read out on a single physical control vs. the change of a fault killing a touchscreen.

You'd want to make sure you could field-service the backlight on those things.

I'm honestly really surprised at the choice of touch screens; traditionally, for safety reasons, launches of other spacecraft have involved crew in bulky pressurized suits that A) don't feel like they fit those seats and B) probably aren't conducive to the use of touch controls.

I'd be incredibly surprised if they had a suit with the level of fine motor control in the fingers that touch would require, but I'd also be incredibly surprised to see crew at launch not in suits.

Just adding a tiny bit of conductive material to the tips of the fingers would allow for touch screens to work.

This is how touch screen capable gloves were first made, using bits of silver on the finger tips.

If the cabin is pressurized why would they need suits? Did SpaceX ever say anything about this? Imagine the operational cost savings of not needing them for anything but space walks outside the station.

Pressurized (lightweight) suits during launch / landing offer an extra security in case something goes wrong (Soyux 11)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11#Death_of_crew

I thought that as well, but then I realized that there are some other fairly large benefits to the touch screens, namely the ability to change the entirety of the controls when needed. If something goes wrong, the entire control panel can be changed to a "Fix this one thing" mode, with fist-sized buttons for easy pushing.

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