Also, Digital Apollo by David Mindell.<p>Early on--being the late 50s and into the early 70s--the desire for pilot control was entirely the rational thing. Automation was very primitive and pretty much limited to doing the right thing only when the situation was nominal. Pilots are easily overwhelmed by tedium and a &quot;pilot in the loop&quot; design methodology prevailed at NASA. Basically that means if a human can do it, they should. The Soviet design took a different tack and invested more in automation, dooming some cosmonauts but being probably for the best long-term.<p>Nowadays we know how to do some things very, very well--rendezvous--so heavy automation makes sense. In other areas that are more research projects pilot in the loop still makes sense.<p>It&#x27;s a tradeoff of efficiency for flexibility and fault tolerance.