&quot;Astronauts insisted that there had to be something only humans could do&quot;<p>Its been a common rationalization meme for many years because it feels so good.<p>However the actual reason is during the entire mission everything is either unrecoverable due to equipment failure (see actual disasters) or happens slowly and&#x2F;or reversibly enough that some combination of human and automatic controls can return to nominal.<p>Except the landing gear.  That deploys and you&#x27;re done.  Not like normal aviation gear where you can lift gear in flight.  I would have to look at the L&#x2F;D ratios and the heading alignment cones but it &quot;feels likely&quot; that an early deployment at any stage of the mission other than 15 seconds before landing means you&#x27;re not landing on the runway.<p>Everything else you can compensate for or have an abort mode or so &quot;something&quot;.  You can only lift the gear on the ground with support crew not wearing space suits removing a spring loaded lock and even then the shuttle doesn&#x27;t have the plumbing to lift the gear.  Simplicate and add lightness.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.ksc.nasa.gov&#x2F;shuttle&#x2F;technology&#x2F;sts-newsref&#x2F;sts-gear.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.ksc.nasa.gov&#x2F;shuttle&#x2F;technology&#x2F;sts-newsref&#x2F;s...</a><p>This is something that never really made it into sci fi books or fan fic or thrillers or whatever.  If you want to trap a shuttle in orbit and make it un-deorbitable you don&#x27;t need to take a fire axe to equipment racks or fire rifles or all kinds of hollywood idiocy, just push the gear down button and its all over, that&#x27;s one ship that won&#x27;t be landing without extensive spacewalk work.<p>So... you don&#x27;t need autoland capability unless a suicidal crewman or russian agent or whatever popped the gear, because you don&#x27;t currently have a way to un-pop the gear... Pre ISS there were no failure modes that would result in the crew not being able to ride the orbiter down even if they had to be in suits (O2 failure or something).  Post ISS if the O2 system failed rather than trying a landing in full pressure suits they&#x27;d probably have tried an auto-land... and guess about when they developed the autoland cable...<p>In practice if it happened in orbit, perhaps attached to the ISS, someone would figure out and ship up some kind of weird levers for shuttle astronauts to use to re-lock the gear, then do an auto-landing and hope it works.  Also I think you have to boot up the APU(s) first before pressing the button would do much of anything.<p>Something to think about is the shuttle was originally sold to be all things to all people and the .mil probably didn&#x27;t like the idea of the Russians being able to remotely steal a shuttle or remotely mission kill it.<p>As a meta question why would you launch a manned mission if an unmanned mission would have worked just as well?<p>And linked to above, if all you need is a &quot;simple&quot; 25 foot cable to autoland, why will the meme of &quot;can&#x27;t autoland&quot; never die?  Its like talking about mysql not having transactions, despite transactions having been added back in &#x27;95 or so.