Remote controllability | Mission Planning Workgroup | Forum

People have probably been thinking this implicitly for a while, but it is worth making clear: we are going to want every aspect of the spacecraft to be remotely controllable.  This is for several reasons:

• It will allow us to perform unmanned lunar flybys to test out all our important systems before sending a pilot to the moon.
• It will allow ground controllers to keep a mission going if the pilot is significantly incapacitated in any way during a mission.
• It will be vital for the part of our business plan where we sell suborbital and maybe orbital joy rides.  Most dangerous fun things that require careful training to be safe (parachuting, sky diving, etc) are only feasible as commercial operations because they have a "tandem" option.  You can give anybody off the street a little bit of training, then strap them tightly to somebody who actually knows what they are doing and throw them off a plane.  Since CLLARE is a one-person spacecraft, we can't send joy riders up with experienced pilots to do the hard work, they'll be going up solo.  We are going to want to largely disable the cockpit controls and handle the flights ourselves so that they are safe.