An oddity of the shuttle program (and I wish I could find the exact citation for this now!) is that the orbiter could fly this entire approach and landing on autopilot. But the landing gear button was engineered so that a human being had to press it, ensuring that the Shuttle would never fly unmanned.
It was; the astronaut corps, leery of being engineered out of their profession, lobbied hard for it. If I recall correctly, there's a brief discussion of the subject in The Space Shuttle Decision [1], which I can recommend most enthusiastically to anyone interested in how this unique and remarkable spacecraft, and how the difference came to be so broad between what it was and what it was meant to be.
