NASA flight controllers cancelled the second manual piloting exercise scheduled for 10:55 PM EDT on Day 8, disclosing the decision in an editor's note with no reason given 1. Koch and Hansen completed a 41-minute manual demo in six degrees of freedom on Day 4 , so the capability has partial validation. The Day 8 exercise would have been the mission's final opportunity to generate additional piloting data.
The cancellation follows the same disclosure pattern as the radiation shelter demo : editor's notes beneath the main blog post rather than headline acknowledgement. The two most operationally novel items on the Day 8 schedule vanished from the timeline without public explanation, and the data they would have generated is now gone for the entire mission.
A propulsion characterisation test of the oxygen manifold was prioritised over the piloting exercise 2, a scheduling decision that reveals flight managers' assessment of where downstream programme risk lies. The pattern of quiet operational adjustments, from Hansen's cabin pressure alarm disclosure at a CSA media call to these editor's notes, establishes a consistent gap between what the mission experiences and what the public learns in real time.
