Dyna-Soar question

From: Pat Flannery (flanner_at_daktel.com)
Date: 03/26/05 

Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2005 17:07:58 -0600

Which, amazingly and rarely enough, is actually on-topic for this newsgroup.
I've been rereading Milt Thompson's "Flying Without Wings", about the
lifting body program at Dryden, and he writes about the waning days of
the X-20 Dyna-Soar program (which he blames mainly on infighting within
the USAF between the manned aerodynamic vehicle advocates, and the
expendable rocket/ manned ballistic capsule advocates) and states that
the manned aerodynamic vehicle crew were trying to get the complete
Titan III/Dyna-Soar stack under the manual control of the pilot during
the whole ascent.
This sounds like something that would very tricky to do, and frankly I
have a hard time understanding what exactly the advantage of such an
approach would be, other than possibly for quick retargeting of the
Dyna-Soar during a military mission.
But in that case you would have to give the Dyna-Soar's guidance system
the data anyway, so that the pilot would know what ascent profile to
fly, so wouldn't it be just as easy to program the Titan III's guidance
system with it?

Pat