Imagine finding this bad boy in your shower: Brit startup pulls the sheets off Moon spider mech In a week where the space-faring community said goodbye to death-defying cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, Skyrora upped the ante with its rocket testing, Elon Musk and Jim Bridenstine kissed and made up, and Britain said it would be sending mech-spider nightmare fuel to the Moon. Your worst nightmare? Brit spiderbot* to roam the Moon …
A spider is still a spider if you pull four of its legs off*, is it not? So I think you get a pass on that anyway.
*which I am not advocating, before any animal rights activists get worked up, although they seem less quick to defend the rights of creepy-crawlies anyway.
Indeed, the animal rights lobby goes hardest over animals we have diminutives for like baa lambs, bunny rabbits, puppy dogs and pussy cats. As a former licensed animal experimenter I knew full well that a few Frankenstein (sorry transgenic) mice were not top priority.
During my PhD in New Zealand we were visited by Prof Colin Blakemore who used to be hate figure #1 for the animal rightists to the extent of needing 24/7 police protection. We were walking over the road to our lab (my boss was hosting him) after his talk, it was a lovely spring day, new leaves on thet trees, the sun shining, the birds singing. He stopped and remarked how lovely it was to be able to do that and feel safe. He didn't have or need any minders on the NZ leg of his trip.
As they told us when I worked at NIMR in NW London the animal rights mob had committed more individual acts of terrorism on the British mainland than the IRA, they just used much smaller bombs and wielded baseball bats not armalites. Things got a lot quieter when they put a lot of the worst in gaol over the guinea pig farm shenanigans, which included digging up someone's grandma from the cemetery and holding the remains hostage. They also suborned a staffer at DVLA who was givng them address details from license plates. He got gaol time too.
... we're going to have multiple small rovers dropping and rolling or crawling or walking off and taking all kinds of pictures and data
Whilst I'd like to raise a pint to the guys behind this, I can't help but get an uneasy feeling that we're now on the cusp of an age where we're going to be flinging an almost endless stream of short-lived tech onto the surface of the moon, just to add to the already depressing amount of end-of-life junk that we've already littered the space around the Earth with.
So what? It makes absolutely no difference to anything. The Moon isn't exactly an ecosystem.
Nor is the Earth orbit, for the case. Problem is that all that trash that we leave out there is coming to bite us back sooner or later. The Earth orbit is a worse case than the Moon surface as it is a lot more "populated" and it has a lot more (and more dangerous) trash that can impact any valuable satellite or space ship. There is a lot of dangerous sized trash that is being tracked, but there is a lot that is not tracked at all, not to talk of "unknown" origin one, a.k.a. military/spy satellite debris.
Ahhh, Clangers don't use towels. Here's the canonical episode, which it says here is almost FIFTY YEARS OLD (!) showing how they deal with trundlebots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HArUmqqiL0s
Extremely prescient model-making there, there was nothing so advanced in real life in December 1969. Ingesting samples for internal labs didn't happen until Viking in 1976, IIRC.
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It says in the story that it can only "scuttle 10 meters"???
I'm kind of struggling to see the point. It's almost like the aeronautical equivalent of a selfie stick.
To be fair, it's a fairly speculative tech demonstrator which weighs just over a kilo. I assume the dimensions are fairly tiny and 10m is quite a lot of "walking" for it. Enough to refine the design for larger/more expensive vehicles that need to negotiate target terrain like difficult slopes.
The meaning of that sentence depends wholly on tone of voice, and the way you first read it will say a lot about you personally. I read it in a purring, sexually suggestive voice. There will be a Venn diagram of arachnophobes, technophiles, autistic spectrumers, obsessive compulsives, sexual deviants/specialists and so on that will all read it differently.
I love tech. I love spiders because they terrify my awful sister and I bring spiders indoors to keep her away. This article inspires me to build a remote control tarantula that I can post through her letterbox to scare her to death. Is there an existing RPi project that does this?
Even comes complete with glowy red HAL light!
In all seriousness though, there's a fair chance this could end up burning - this is flying on the very first mission for ULA's new Vulcan rocket. It's literally a certification flight. I wish them the best and hope it won't end up burning on the pad in Florida.
Strictly speaking they'd have to send more than one (spiders – plural) to Mars and then they'd have to be able to get more than one of them back from Mars to Earth because otherwise technically speaking they wouldn't be The Spiders from Mars – they'd just be a spider or spiders on Mars.
Picky I know.
You could build a hutch for them on the roof and fit them with silk spinners to abseil down on the marketers making hissing sounds.
I once answered the door to two female JW's dressed for the run I was preparing for, split shorts, technical t-shirt. The short one accused me of being dressed in my underwear. After failing to interest them in my counter proselytisation for the light of Reason and Science I finished my prep and passed them as I hared off up the road to prove my point.
It wasn't as though I was wearing the non baggy shorts or the tiny pair left over from the '90s that my daughters banned me from wearing, they were my black and red baggy shorts. Not my fault they get the vapours at the sight of my muscular legs.
"A relief, no doubt, for 2024's moon-walkers worried about Opportunity-esque longevity"
There, FTFY.
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