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NASA Tests Hardware, Software On Armadillo Rocket
porcinist writes "On June 23 NASA successfully tested hardware and software on an Armadillo Rocket. With the end of NASA's Constellation program in sight, NASA is starting to focus on new, innovative exploration programs like Project-M. This project is meant to land a robotic humanoid on the moon in a thousand days. To meet this goal NASA teamed with Armadillo Aerospace and Draper Labs (the lab responsible for creating the original Apollo Guidance Computer) to integrate and flight test a real-time navigation system in only seven weeks. This might be the fastest thing NASA has done in 30 years. Maybe NASA is taking Obama's new vision to heart."
The robot is not new, the "robonaut" has been around for many years... it's what you get when the government throws some R&D cash at the auto industry
Since a robot will be sent, the launch vehicle and lunar lander will not be man-rated, so they are not in the path to sending humans at a later date. The joke is that Obama says we have no need to return to the moon, so then his boys plan a robotic moon landing to show the public that they are doing something in space. If successful, the robot in the moon will give ammunition to Obama's anti-space supporters who have wanted to redirect all NASA money into the welfare system for many years.This mission will signal the end of American manned space exploration.
>Until human beings actually go somewhere "out there", it is not exploration. It is investigation.
Bullshit semantics. Be it via meatbag or via robot, you're still exploring. Except the meatbag option is 1000x the cost and gives us less than 100000x the range with current technology. We've explored Venus and Saturn and Jupiter. You can deny it all you want, but you wont convince anyone outside of your marginalized minority echochamber.