On: What do all the controls in an aeroplane cockpit do?

[frik]

NASA released many old manuals to the public, including several Space Shuttle PDFs.

Flying the space shuttle is more like programming a flight computer and checking the flight data. There are some manual overwrites, that's the challenging part.

e.g. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/390651main_shuttle_c...

[schoen → frik]

Wow, that manual is a lot more detailed than the popularization.

Isn't there also a flying-it-like-a-glider part after re-entry? But I guess that's a pretty small fraction of the mission.