BIONIC MAN makes it to top of Chicago skyscraper Bionics took a giant step forward on Sunday – or 2,109 steps, to be precise – when Zac Vawter became the first person to climb the 103 stories to the SkyDeck of Chicago's famed Willis Tower using a mind-controlled prosthetic leg. As reported by the Associated Press, the 31-year-old Vawter, who lost his right leg in a …
There is a recent comic series, The Bionic Man, (They could get the rights to the name of the TV series but it is Steve Austin and Oscar Goldman) written by Kevin Smith that takes an updated approach to Martin Caiden's 'Cyborg' story. One change is that they remove and replace Austin surviving arm because it makes him unbalanced. There is also a framework running throughout his body to support the bionic limbs and the stresses they cause.
In one scene a discussion of the project's cost comes up and someone estimates it at $6 million... a day.
Actually, it was mentioned in the original TV movie and follow-ons before they went to series. My siblings and I avidly followed the series early on because so much of the exteriors were shot in or near my childhood home town, Thousand Oaks, CA. For instance, in an early first season episode Steve has to cross a minefield to get to a strange looking bunker in the distance. The 'bunker' was the old Thousand Oaks Civic Center and the minefield was the open patch where the Oaks Mall was built a few years later. (The same building was the home of Proteus IV in the movie 'Demon Seed.')
Anyway, Rudy Wells mentions in passing early on that Steve's remaining biological parts benefited from not having to to oxegenate the blood for the three replaced limbs and that this meant greater endurance. It was exactly the kind of nerd detail my brothers and I would delight in knowing when others had ignored that bit of dialogue.
Well it's a prototype deep in R&D land, so its cost is largely irrelevant when considering " the price range of average citizens – astronauts or otherwise". You wouldn't you look at Volkswagen's annual report and say "that €6.9 billion is wasted - nobody will pay that for a Golf!"
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