U.S. space program 2025

Will there be money enough (1.) for low earth orbit so as to allow a "commercial" space station to financially breakeven, (2.) to fund a manned Mars landing and return, (3.) compete with a manned Zhongguo/Rossiya* moon base, the ILRS, and (4.) do some actual space science? I don't believe it. Once again, try to do too many things at once and you end up doing nothing well.

* "Chinese/Russian"

Hacking toys again

This toy robot* can carry a small sensor pack and an Arduino or Raspberry Pi SBC.

* product model No. 968 "engineering vehicle" Shantou Jiabaile products co. ltd.

This robot* is large enough to carry a sensor package like the one in my blog of 10 February 2025.

* The chassis is taken from an amphibious remote control car manufactured by Spobot and the gripper assembly is from the innobot coding robot kit from Thin Air Brands.
 

Hacking toys has a long and honorable history, the first programmable pick and place robot was built from  Meccano (Erector set) in the mid 1930s. See Meccano Magazine, March 1938, pg 172, and The Robot Gargantua, cyberneticzoo.com under early industrial robots. And the earliest Roomba prototype was made with Lego in 1989.

How do you get there from here?

How does one peacefully get from todays hyper capitalism to a just democratic socialist state? I have suggested that one step might be to make all businesses nonprofit. This might be practical since something like half of businesses today are not currently profitable.

A.I. agents

In the mass of hype* that surrounds the world of A.I. research today the definition of "agent" has been lost. An agent is reactive, autonomous, goal oriented, and continuous running. Agents are frequently also communicative, mobile, flexible, and learn and have "personalities." A.s.a. H. A.I. agents have existed for many years now.

* i.e., lies 

Physical A.I.

A rebuild of one of my first Lego A.s.a. H. A.I. robots. The original was made using Lego that belonged to Emporia State University and that was left behind when I retired.

 I've had best results with a society composed of 4 or 5 different specialist agents, each having no more than 6 degrees of freedom.

Manned flight to Mars

I'd be happy to see a project to send a small crew to Mars and back but not at the expense of any science projects. And humans should only fly when they are really needed/useful.

Emporia State University

 I retired from ESU in spring of 2022. The next semester ESU broke the law in firing a number of tenured faculty. Now they are trying to get out of this by asking the state to change the law RETROACTIVELY. This is what capitalism is like. Capitalism cheats. (See my work on value, e.g. chapter 2 of my book Twelve Papers, at www.robert-w-jones.com)