Question: what is the control panel on a rocket called? xx

Adam Stevens answered on 21 Mar 2012:

A…… control panel?

In fact, a lot of the control of a rocket is done by computers. The astronauts generally don’t have that much input.

The way this has been done has varied a lot over the years – early Russian ships had essentially NO manual input, it was all automatic.

The American systems were originally designed with no input, but because all the early astronauts were fighter pilots, they persuaded the engineers to put in control sticks and things so that they could control the rocket in an emergency.

This ended up being a pretty good idea, since in quite a few of the first american spaceflights, the automatic system failed and the astronaut had to do a manual re-entry!

Nowadays the astronauts have a lot more input, though normally they tell a computer to do something and the computer does all the complicated stuff that that requires. For example, to turn a rocket around in space you don’t jsut turn the steering wheel, you have to fire several small rockets at exactly the right time for exactly the right length of time in exactly the right combination. So, the astronaut might tell the computer to ‘turn left’ and then the computer chooses which jets to fire.

That’s not to say that flying rockets is easy, the Space Shuttle cockpit was way more complicated than any aeroplane!