DEXTRE

Sure, click.

You wouldn't believe how junked up the original graphic was with nomenclature. These people are more screwed up on nomenclature than the Army. Anyway, obviously DEXTRE has two arms. You can see that, right? It's Canada's new manipulator robot for the International Space Station, and it's installed and powered up now and I guess ready to work.

Hmmm I don't like that "Special Purpose" thing. That sort of emphasizes all the things DEXTRE probably can't do.

There are an awful lot of very serious scientists -- like the late James Van Allen -- who don't think human beings should be in space in the first place, at least not in this early phase of our off-Earth outreach. Robots do the work orders of magnitude more cheaply. They've already been whizzing around all sorts of places like Saturn and Mercury and crawling all over the surface of Mars sending back archives of fantastic images -- humans are decades, maybe a century from being able to orbit or make landings on other planets.

And when the robots suffer a terrible catastrophe, nobody declares a national week of mourning. In fact the robots don't expect to come home so they can resume their family lives with spouse and kids in Nebraska or Osaka in the first place.

That's why robots go first to check out suspicious unattended packages in public spaces for the Bomb Squad. If things suddenly go south, you don't even have to send a sympathy card.

I know -- I'm talking as if robots had no feelings.

(Robots have no feelings.)

The ISS has no artificial gravity -- a carousel wheel is the simplest gimmick -- so all the humans have to devote about half their waking hours to constant exercizing to maintain their health. Without the atmosphere to protect us, there's a flux of lethal ionizing radiation in space, oh probably something like the equivalent of five dental X-rays a day if the shielding is pretty good.

Mainly humans are in space because of the romance -- I don't mean necking and billing and cooing, I mean because the taxpayers don't get very thrilled about what robots do in space, even though what robots do in space is far more spectacular (in terms of real science and real discovery) than what the Human Earth Orbit Club can do in space.

The ISS is also a very fragile piece of architecture and some bizarre amount of constant repair and maintenance is required just to keep it up and safe for the humans. Hopefully, DEXTRE will be doing a lot of this maintenance (notice he doesn't have to breathe) and so cut down on very risky human spacewalks.

I'm sorry. I'd jump at the chance to go out there. But scientifically, humans in space make about as much sense as new roller coasters, which are mega-cool, but they don't go anywhere and they don't do anything.

Just because I really think something's very cool doesn't mean it's a good idea. I drove my cousin's brand-new Corvette Stingray once. Very cool. Terrible idea for a motor vehicle. But very cool.