I can recommend the book <i>Digital Apollo</i> to anyone interested. Especially the first parts cover the question of what the role of the human is in the endeavour at large, and during the flight of Saturn V in particular.<p>Rocket designers came from the business of autonomous cruise missiles and argued that the rocket can get itself into space just fine on its own. Astronauts -- being test pilots of aircraft -- wanted to hand-fly rockets off the earth. In the end, this particular debate was won by the missile people because it turns out the navigation and sequencing of events to get a rocket off the planet happens so quickly and under such accelerations that humans cannot, in fact, do it by hand.<p>However, the book ends on an optimistic note regarding the role of humans in spaceflight. We ought not to send humans to space because they do it better than machines. They barely did back then, and they certainly don't now. We do it to broaden the human experience. We do it to enhance what it means to be human. We are Aventurers and conquerors. We use our brains to put our bodies and senses through experiences and into places they were never meant to go.<p>It doesn't matter that computers get better than us at things. We will still do them, because doing them anyway is what makes us human.<p>----<p>There are a lot of great books on this for the interested. Aside from <i>Digital Apollo</i>, off the top of my head I can recommend<p>- <i>Go, Flight!</i> from the perspecive of the young flight controllers who orchestrated the missions from scratch.<p>- <i>Sunburst and Luminary</i> from the perspective of some of the first ever software developers working on the computer in the lunar module.<p>- <i>Ignition!</i> from the perspective of the chemists that tried to find stuff that would go fwoooooosh rather than boom or fuitt.<p>High on my to-read list is<p>- <i>Aiming at Targets</i> which I understand is written from the perspective of the higher echelons of NASA.