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?"

Comments

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

[flaming error]

Trillions to NASA?

I think taxpayers should be upset that their education system produces nerds that have no sense of perspective, that can't do math, that favor wild-ass exaggeration over a modicum of fact-checking, and worst of all, don't like the Monkees.

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

[camperdave]

But one thing they *don't* skimp on, and have *never* skimped on, is good PR.

I disagree. They have lousy PR. Oh sure, they may spend a lot of money on PR, and they may have a huge PR staff, but they aren't getting the job done. That job: making it so that every high school kid in the English speaking world wants to be an astronaut, and making sure every American is eager to send their taxes to NASA. All they show is astronauts playing zero-g games, and put Lego figurines on spacecraft. How does that help? Ron Howard has done more to promote NASA.

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

[Americano]

What absolutely slays me about these arguments is that there's a lot of willfully ignorant nerds who will blithely assure us that "mining the moons of Jupiter is totally economically feasible, or will be someday" despite all of the points you've pointed out.

They KNOW the distances involved. They KNOW that you would literally need to have hundreds of cargo ships in transit at all times to establish any sort of economically viable supply line, with a supply line that was literally YEARS long, each carrying hundreds of tons of whatever material you hope to recover, and they KNOW that we would regularly have multiple-hundred-ton cargo ships needing to be offloaded, and the material shipped down to the surface here.

But none of those practical considerations matter one whit, because they read a science fiction book once in high school. It's like the brain just shuts down as soon as somebody says "space," and the solution to everything becomes some magic pixie dust that doesn't exist, but "totally will, soon."

They want to explore space? Great, get started building better, smarter, more independent robots, and find a cheap way to launch a million of them to other stars, then hope that some survive the tens or hundreds of thousands of years required to reach even our nearest stellar neighbors, then wait years for their communications to reach us back here on earth. Hopefully somebody's great-great-great-great-greatx10^10000 grandchildren will have the technology, and care enough to remember to listen for those broadcasts someday in 88,011.

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

[joeyblades]

So what?

What can be learned from the exploration of the moon or Mars? Maybe some natural history, but that will have very little impact on the quality of life here on Earth.

I know: knowledge is power, but the cost / benefit analysis just doesn't hold up. Once we get all the problems sorted out on terra firma, then we can think about spending money on off-world exploration... and even then, does it really need to be manned exploration? By the time we're ready to resume spaceward boondoggles, maybe we'll have autonomous robots that are more than capable enough to get the job done at a fraction of the cost, for longer periods of time, and no unnecessary risks to humans.

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

[GooberToo]

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.

You're conflating NASA with Congress. There is a difference. The vast, vast majority of everything negative about NASA today, and why its in such a shape, is specifically because of Congress.

The shuttle that flies today, aside from being a lifting body, has nothing to do with what NASA originally designed and fought to build. Congress, and by extension lobbying from NSA and the Air Force, is what made the shuttle a cluster fuck. Sorry, but any blame for the cluster fuck that is the space shuttle does not belong with NASA, but rather the NSA, the USAF, and most definitely, the US Congress.

Re:Missed opportunity

[crazyaxemaniac]

“Good Morning, Dr. Chandra. I’m ready for my first lesson now.”

sigh...

That didn't exactly end well for the humans.

They're doing it wrong

[Wolvenhaven]

The robot should have looked out the window and said "Hello World."

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...

How exactly do you define..?

[intellitech]

How exactly do you define "nothing to show for it," exactly? How about, for starters, just being able to do it? In order to get from point A to point B, there are going to be hiccups, but you're going to learn from them. The shuttle was a hiccup, in the sense that there may have been a cheaper way to do it, but with all the requirements the shuttle had, it's kind of hard to keep costs down.

so?

[pak9rabid]

Let me get this straight. A robot is programmed to wake up, then submit a pre-programmed tweet to twitter, and does exactly that. Why is this news & who the fuck cares?