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."

Comments

Exploration

[Gonoff]

Until human beings actually go somewhere "out there", it is not exploration. It is investigation.

Sending a robotic device to the moon is good preliminary investigation, but until people go back there, exploraion will not have restarted.

Mars is completely unexplored. A lot of time & money has been well used on investgating it but the next stage needs to start.

Re:Why humanoid?

[destroyer661]

Two things. First, the humanoid is the result of millions of years of recent evolution. It's a solid design. Sure, you probably can come up with a better design, but why throw away what already works? That's wasteful. Second, we have millennia of human technology designed for the humanoid form. Why throw that away either? Same argument about waste applies.

Sure, on Earth. We haven't been living in space for millions of years, but under the Earth's gravity, the atmosphere, etc. Space is an entirely different environment and we would likely have developed entirely different in that environment. The tools argument is the most valid of the lot, but realistically we could/already have designed something better to accomplish tasks.