[WalterBright]

It didn't have to have manual controls, and in fact the fatal accident was caused by moving the wrong control.

Automated controls are more ambitious than manual controls. Note that the Apollo 11 was supposed to be totally automated, but Armstrong saved the mission by overriding it and doing it manually.

> most boring

Well, until the automation goes wrong, then it is briefly very exciting.

[tigershark]

Only because of resources limitation in the ‘60s. He had to shut down some non-essential system to let the main process go on. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/apollo-11s-120...

Nothing to do with the catastrophic bugs in Boeing’s Starliner that caused the failure to reach the ISS and that would have risked the astronauts life if they didn’t fix two issues (literally) on the fly.

[WalterBright]

> Only because of resources limitation in the ‘60s.

Doesn't matter what the excuses were. It was supposed to work, it failed, and Armstrong took over and saved the mission.

> Nothing to do with the catastrophic bugs

Most every software bug today, once rooted out, looks like a mistake only an incompetent programmer would make. Except the best programmers make these mistakes, because humans are fallible.

If I recall correctly, SpaceX had some unintended disassemblies from software problems, too.

[tigershark]

SpaceX had no RUD or any problem whatsoever because of software during the commercial crew test missions. Which RUD caused by a software bug are you referring to?

[WalterBright]

Some of the early (unmanned) landing failures, if I recall correctly.