Upgrading the US Space Shuttle fleet with a new "smart cockpit"

Abstract

As the space shuttle program celebrates its 20" anniversary of human space flight, work is underway to develop a major Cockpit Avionics Upgrade (CAU) for the U.S. Space Shuttle orbiter fleet. The Command and Display Processing Subsystem (CDPS) represents the third generation of display avionics for the orbiters and builds upon the Multifunction Electronic Display Subsystem (MEDS) or "glass cockpit" already installed onboard Atlantis and Columbia and scheduled for installation on the rest of the fleet. United Space Alliance is heading the upgrade project as part of its space flight operations contract with NASA. With the goal of first flight in 2006, this upgrade is an important aspect of the "Shuttle of the Future" program, which aims to upgrade vehicle safety and enable the current shuttle orbiter fleet to keep flying for another 15-20 years.

Effects of the Space Shuttle Cockpit Avionics Upgrade on Crewmember Performance and Situation Awareness

“…To address these human-factors issues with the MEDS cockpit, groups of astronauts, flight controllers, astronaut instructors, engineers, and human factors scientists recently completed a usability-oriented modification of the MEDS formats known as Cockpit Avionics Upgrade (CAU) (McCandless, McCann, & Hilty, 2003). The CAU project included implementation of a new display management hardware architecture that allowed CAU display units to mix information from multiple GPCs (Marchant et al, 2001). This permitted information to be consolidated in a task-oriented, rather than source-oriented, manner.…”

“…The formats of MEDS were intentionally designed to be backward compatible with those of the original cockpit system, both to minimize crew retraining requirements and to preserve as much of the existing display management software as possible (Marchant, Eastin, & Ferguson, 2001). Even though these reasons were legitimate, this backward compatibility also meant that MEDS inherited a number of human-factors issues from the original cockpit.…”