Hubble Space Telescope (HST) or Hubble Sleeping Beauty (HSB)
By SheepOverboard science correspondent Dr. Collin
Imagine the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) manned - and Dextre (SPDM) on a robotic rescue mission to save not only the platform but the people on it.
Columbia and Challenger shuttle tragedies impinged deeply into social awareness across the globe. Sadly, as it stands, the Dextre-led operation to repair The Hubble Space Telescope might acquire exciting (not quite melodramatic) adventure status in science and education realms but will surely provoke little interest in 99% of earthly minds.
An educated elite, the intellectually-curious and scientifically-aware who nurture and inspire technology’s vigor, might yet miss the import of a Dextre-Hubble mission despite their assured fascination and support.
Our Fox-led, tabloid-screaming, market-driven, self-promoting, dumb-down six o’clock newstainment press might, with serendipitous irony, inculcate upon the great unwashed some essence of this space robot adventure.
Through their “news service” (an oxymoron industriously uninvolved) media conglomerates might, with equally unintended childish purity, incidentally accidentally endear Dextre and Hubble to our otherwise oblivious uninformed.
Might Dextre attain idol popularity as a fairy-tale robot rescuing a soon-to-be Hubble sleeping beauty with the gentle caress of its OTCM (Orbital Tool Change out Mechanism)?
Absence of people on Hubble (HST) decreases the chance of Dextre becoming the most famous robot since Lost in Space’s Robbie, or 2001’s HAL, despite Dextre being hard software on a world-stage mission.
Dextre contends as the first famous real robot in history - an incarnate, identifiable artificial being. Though a collection of discrete, independent, complex systems - and despite being controlled by (astronaut) operators via a Robotics Work Station (RWS) - Dextre will probably owe his fame and identity to a newstainment press mentality derisively described above.
Their crass superficial trivializing might ironically breathe life into this virtual dextrous virtuoso, an engineering non-entity.
Depending on the luck of the draw (ie: newsworthy competition) the media might obsessively (obsession being their specialty) launch Dextre to space superstar status.
Fleeting fame awaits fickle fortune.
