Humanoid Robot Wakes In Space, Tweets

DeviceGuru writes to note that "Robonaut 2 (aka R2), the first humanoid robot to become a permanent resident of the International Space Station (ISS), was awakened from stasis this week after six months in orbit. R2s first words? 'Those electrons feel GOOD!' The success of R2's activation on the ISS paves the way for putting R2 through its first movements in orbit on Sept. 1, when R2 will be sent commands for moving its arms and hands. Assuming these and other tests proceed without a hitch, R2 will start assisting the ISS crew with simple tasks in 2012. Coffee? Tea? Cigarettes?"

You know, I've got to say one thing for NASA

[elrous0]

Their budget has been in the shitter since Apollo. They haven't sent a man beyond low-earth orbit since "My Three Sons" was still on the air. Their attempt to build an economical, reusable spaceship resulted in an overpriced money-sink that required a complete rebuild at every launch and ate $700 million every time it lifted off. Their great international space station turned out to be gloried Mir that can't even maintain its own orbit and whose primary design function seems to have been justifying the Space Shuttle program. And, despite repeated promises of going back to the moon and to Mars, we're farther away from either goal today than we were when the Monkees were still popular.

But one thing they *don't* skimp on, and have *never* skimped on, is good PR. If they were half as good at generating spacecraft designs as they are at generating good publicity, man would have been on Mars decades ago.

So no man on Mars. No moonbases. No Kubrick-style space hotels. But, on the upside, we do have a "robot" that tweets messages about how fucking great NASA is.

Re:You know, I've got to say one thing for NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes, you've been robbed of your childhood dreams. The fact that physics, technology and materials have limits, that space is utterly hostile, that humans fall apart in free fall, that space is a radiation-blasted hell have nothing to do with it. How do you wake up every morning on this forsaken mud ball that has everything on it? Are you a kind of Space Goth, listening to depressing music while crying to his 2001 posters?

Re:GM?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm assuming that, unless they've quietly reverted to savagery behind the factory gates, GM is continuing their interest in developing more versatile assembly line robots.

Vehicle assembly lines have long been pretty robot friendly(lots of fixed-and-predictably sized parts, some of them too heavy for humans to handle effectively for more than a short time, that need to be moved on well defined paths between various, not infrequently dangerous, bits of machinery and then spot welded together...) There are, though, areas that have continued to be too fiddly, space constrained, or otherwise tricky for your basic "Big hydraulic arm on a stalk" style assembly robots(which shrug at holding steel structural elements in place while spot welding them; but aren't so hot at threading wiring harnesses through little crannies and such). Presumably, something a bit smaller and more humanoid is intended to start eliminating the remaining humans from those positions, after some initial R&D shared with NASA...