Who should fly into space and should it be a person at all

Shouldn't pilots have been sent to the moon? said prof. David A. Mindell (1) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in an interview given to Politics magazine on the XNUMXth anniversary of the moon landing.

Was it a clash of two environments or cultures within NASA? Mindell said? test pilots, gathered in the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, and engineers originally associated with the rocket industry. The former, for obvious reasons, wanted the greatest possible participation of pilots in space expeditions. On the other hand, another environment did not see a place for a man at the helm of a spaceship. (?)

The symbolic beginning of this conflict is the speech of Wernher von Braun, a Nazi engineer and co-inventor of the V-2 rocket, who worked for the United States after the war. In 1959, he made a presentation at the congress of the Society of Experimental Pilots, in which he argued that the development of space and rocket technology would actually lead to the elimination of pilots. Needless to say, the pilots received it coldly. (?)

The first space programs? X-15 rocket plane, Gemini and Mercury? they were highly automated, and the role of the pilots was very limited. Apollo seems to be similar. Is this evidenced by the first order in preparation for the flight to the moon? it was a contract to build a central on-board computer!?

You will find the continuation of the article in the May issue of the magazine

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