Perhaps it should be law that all vehicles have a compatible grapple fixture
so one could at least secure the craft while you were sorting out the fine
print, so to speak.

Brian

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"Greg (Strider) Moore" wrote in message
m...
My job is keeping datacenters running 24/7. This means often having a
person onsite to do some physical work (replacing equipment, etc.)

I learned long ago that having someone "remote' worked far better since
they can have a much better big picture of things. The people "on the
ground" so to speak have a very focused view. So while I'm sure in an
emergency a docking could happen, you'd want it to be in near perfect
condition. By involving the ground, you get more eyes on the problem.

Think of air traffic control. You can land a plan at an airport without
help from the tower (and that's done all the time) but for the bigger
planes, bigger airports, etc you really want tower support.

I suppose eventually "ground control" for docking may move to an orbital
facility, but that'll be when we have MUCH larger facilities in space.



"Jorge R. Frank" wrote in message
...

On 03/06/2011 08:12 PM, Snidely wrote:
Jeff scribbled something like ...

says...

How close is ISS to being able to handle a visiting spacecraft's
docking and undocking without ground teams coaching?

Even for completely automated rendezvous and docking, you would still
want to monitor it and have the ability to remotely abort in case
something unexpected happened. Automated systems don't often handle
the unexpected well, because if it really is unexpected, how could the
software developers account for it in the software they wrote?

But you've got people on site to monitor ...

With very limited telemetry from the visiting vehicle, and limited
training. ISS expeditions last six months and during that time the
visiting vehicle manifest can change dramatically.