They Gotta Be Kidding...

Good grief...

With the nation 16 trillion dollars in debt and sinking deeper by the second, NASA,  with no way to orbit it's insanely expensive astronauts other than paying the Russians 60 million a ride,  decides to send a goddamned billion-dollar robot to the space station to monitor air vents, so one of those insanely expensive astronauts doesn't have to.

I posted about this $200 million waste of taxpayer dollars recently,  whom the Canadian Space Agency fondly called "Dextre":

http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=22650918#editor/target=post;postID=2019737756243402003

Ta-Da! Your very own quarter-billion-dollar air

vent monitor! It can even thread a needle.... in around

two days!

R2 – as the robot is now called – got its first taste of real work on Wednesday. The crew and ground team had completed all its initial checkouts, and Tuesday installed heat sinks in both of the robot’s forearms to allow it to better dissipate heat and work for longer periods of time.
 

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/robonaut.html


"Real work". What a sad joke on us all. The damned thing couldn't even monitor air vents without overheating and requiring "heat sinks" jury-rigged onto its arms to dissipate excess heat.

Keep in mind this thing requires a couple astronauts to move it from air vent to air vent. It cannot move by itself.  But that's OK, using insanely expensive astronauts to move a multi-million dollar robot around is a far better thing to do than actually checking the air vents themselves as they float by  during their daily meter-reading and light-bulb monitoring  tasks.

You are witnessing the most expensive method ever devised in the history of the universe to check for clogged air vents.

And you wonder why we're broke, up to out necks in debt, and still borrowing? Go ask a NASA budget guru... they got answers.

And maybe even plans to one day send up the bottom half of that thing - so it can stand up and salute should a United States Congress Budget Committee member  saunter by.

This is what happens when you just throw buckets of money at a wall. None of it sticks... it all falls into the damned toilet, and down the drain it all goes.

Excuse me, I gotta go vomit.