[thelucky41]

I dream of one day becoming a test pilot. Especially in ships during their developmental stages, unaccounted for situations will come up, and a human capable of assessing and managing these situations are necessary.

For each of the technologies involved with the X-37, et al., that technology required testing with a human-in-the-loop to act as the judge for if the control output made sense. It simply isn't feasible to begin testing your robot pilot without first testing it with a pilot there in the first place.