"It would almost certainly not have a keyboard, but would use swipe commands on a touch screen. If that were not possible, due to having to wear gloves, the interface might be through gestures, eye movement or some other intuitive interface."

I'm not quite sure, it was only recently here on HN that we discussed Mazda taking out touchscreens from cars[0]. I don't see any problems with keyboards or other mechanical input devices; experience and discourse shows it might even be preferable.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335

Yeah to add to this - I think physical knobs and switches and dials will be the preferred inputs for the mission critical controls of a space craft (and probably, anywhere, really).

I think all the movies and tv shows that showcase the fancy future touch screens and minority-report style gesture displays will feel as quaint and dated in the next couple decades as Star Trek TOS's incandescent bulb arrays and paper readouts are to us now.

Agreed. I think touchscreens are gaining popularity in consumer devices for a large part because they are cheap compared to mechanical inputs. Mechanical switches, dials and buttons are surprisingly expensive. But when it comes to spacecraft and such, the relative price of these components is insignificant.

Touchscreens are ideal for consumer devices because it means not having to commit to a single UI design - you can move buttons around onscreen as needed, overhaul the software to put things in a new place as you like, and not having to worry that the dial the user turns is tied to a value box that is now on the opposite side of the screen. Not only is it cheaper from a component perspective, but it's cheaper from a design perspective - you don't have to finalise the design for the UI before it goes to manufacturing, just tell the factory to stick a large enough touchscreen in the centre and the UI can be added later, after the various teams have finished arguing.

What they are not, however, is intuitive, much as designers like to say they are - there is zero consistency in the UX between devices, buttons all look different, sometimes between updates, and half the time you open an app, it's a dice roll whether it's going to work the same it did last time. There is also no inherent tactile feedback - phones have haptic vibrators to simulate a button press, but there is no other feedback, and you can't feel the buttons with your fingertips before pushing them. You have to be looking directly at the screen to find the control you need - when the device is primarily designed to be in your hand, it's kind of acceptable, but when it's a control panel for something vital, this simply won't work; your eyes are supposed to be fixed on what the control panel is controlling. These reasons are why Mazda has backed out of using them for cars - your eyes need to be on the road. You can change fan and temperature settings by touch alone once you know where the controls are. In Apollo 13, if Jim Lovell had to keep looking at a touchscreen to make sure he was actually pushing the thrust control in the right direction while keeping his visual fix on the Moon, there's a great chance he'd have sent the stack spinning off into space.

I agree with this 100.000 percent. UX people in general have crawled up their own stacks and died.

There will be a mix. Touch screens are cheap and light compared to mechanical switches. However mechanical switches have a large usability edge. Anything critical or used often will get a mechanical control. However for things that are not critical AND not accessed often a touch screen is cheap and flexible.

The redesign of the F-35 cockpit is going to include touchscreens[0].

I agree that I would prefer physical knobs/dials/buttons to a touch screen but it looks like that's not the direction flight systems are going so I'd have to assume space flight systems will follow suit.

[0] https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/defense/2017-07-19/e...

There are special gloves, that I have, which allow for gestures on my phone. It uses some sort of special mesh on the outside.

> I suspect that the software development time would have been a lot faster, due to the software development tools that are available today. It would have been a lot quicker to write, debug and test the complex code required to deliver a man to the moon.

This is a poor assumption. It takes a lot more effort to create any moderately-complex modern software system today than it did to create software back then. I'm not saying it wasn't hard to do, and in fact squeezing the most out of the primitive computer systems back then was challenging, and any life-critical system requires extensive planning and testing, but having only 32k to operate in severely limited the complexity of any software.

I've worked on modern spacecraft command and control systems, and I've worked with non-flight Fortran code from the Apollo era (ground-based image processing, still in use as recently as 15 years ago, and probably still today). Everything was much simpler back then.

Modern software complexity makes everything take more effort, not less. There's a lot more power and a lot more functionality as well, but back in the 60s software was a whole lot simpler. The plethora of tools today exist to abstract away complexity that wasn't even possible then.

There is nothing in the laws of physics that requires software running on more capable systems to be more complex. It's a choice.

With modern tools I can write the systems of 1960 a lot faster than I can today. However with modern systems we now all want better.

Author mentions the uplink downlink would be the same since the speed of light hasn't changed. That's not really true. While NASA still has communication links to spacecraft that use the same waveform that Apollo used back in the 60s, there are much higher speed links available. The uplink was limited to about 2kbps and that was with 5-to-1 encoding meaning it was more like 400bps. Downlink was either 1.6kbps or 51.6kbps depending on mode. They also had voice channels within this waveform along with a ranging code to determine how far away the spacecraft was. Spacecraft nowadays can use Ka-band communications. NASA pulled off over 500Mbps using Ka-band in 1997 and today there are demonstrations of gigabit links.

My reading says the author confuses latency with bandwidth. The speed of light has nothing to do with the latter.

Anyone here qualified to answer the alternative question "Would your mobile phone be robust enough to get you to the moon?"

I suspect the much more delicate circuitry may be less than reassuring in its ability to deal with the environmental conditions in space.

This article ignores that getting to the moon required a computer that could be simultaneously monitored by the dozens (hundreds?) of experts in mission control, and certainly neglects to account for the "processing power" of all those brains.

phone? your PC keyboard alone is more powerful than Apollo Guidance Computer

Most microcomputers from the 1980s were definitely as or more powerful, at least from a memory footprint and CPU capability standpoint.

A PC keyboard controller - I guess it depends on what is being used; I suppose something that can read a matrix and convert the output to USB HID could be pretty powerful - perhaps at least as much as a PIC or Atmel microcontroller - so perhaps?

most keyboards are still 8051s (yes, even USB ones, the 8051 has had a USB option for a while)

Your right itt would. I realised my phone was way more powerful when I bought my first Nexus. Besides they only used 2 decimal places to get to the moon.

As a rocket engine?