Why Airbus Just Sent Its First Robot Into Space

Dawn was barely breaking on Friday morning over Cape Canaveral in Florida, when Matthius Biniok looked across a bay of water at the rocket that was about to take his floating robot into space. "I feel a little bit like a father that is losing his son," he said from the operational room at the Kennedy Space Centre, 21 minutes before lift-off. Binjok was an artificial intelligence engineer from Germany who had built the brain of CIMON, a spherical robot about the size of a basketball that would propel itself around the zero-gravity environment of the International Space Station by shooting jets of air. Spearheaded by EADS' Airbus, which built the "body" and much of the AI-powered software behind it, CIMON would be the first-known space robot to assist astronauts, an early iteration of HAL 9000 or souped-up version of Wilson depending on your movie preference. Just in front of Binjok on Friday morning, around 100 engineers and scientists mingled on the Kennedy Center's fourth-floor viewing terrace and noticed streaks of pink lighting up the dark sky behind the white crest of a SpaceX's Block 4 Falcon 9 rocket, as the sun prepared to rise.