Tuesday we had a media event at Goddard Space Flight Center to discuss our Robotic Refueling Mission that is hitching a ride aboard the last shuttle flight STS-135. Here's one writer's blog on the event and talk about what might be next for NASA. This stuff is getting very real!
This is what happens when individual passion meets organizational need:
Article from popular science describing RRM without actually talking about RRM.
But it’s now Dextre’s time to cut its teeth on some real cutting-edge space labor. When Atlantis launches for the ISS next month, it will deliver Dextre a collection of fittings and tools that match up to the fixtures integrated into various satellites and spacecraft. Dextre will use these over the next two years to demonstrate that a robotic system is capable of refueling a satellite in orbit, paving the way for a future robotic mission that will try to refuel an aging NOAA weather satellite.
Home to yours truely...
"If you're going to work...
work hard.
That way, you'll have something to show for it.
The biggest waste is to do that thing you call work, but to interrupt it, compromise it, cheat it and still call it work.
In the same amount of time you can expend twice the effort and get far more in exchange."
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/06/if-youre-going-to-work.html
"Our first goal, first and foremost, is to be able to push robotic technology."
This is how we should be developing robotic systems:
Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System from Bret Victor on Vimeo.
People have done partial implementations of this concept for robotics, but nobody has gone in whole-hog. Though there are no doubt technical challenges to overcome, I believe the technology exists to make this feasible. Time to get to work!
More details on Bret's take on applying this approach to various quantitative problems are here.
"And I'm imagining a tool that adapts complex situations so they can be seen, experienced, and reasoned about with our plain old brain."
Thoughtful argument by Gruber on Apple's history of approaching UI design. Another great example of apple living at the intersection of liberal arts and technology.
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