 Americans don't fly spaceships anymore. We catch a ride with Russia. Commercial space flight is awesome, and it's doing really well, and it might get American humans and American vehicles up soon, but it might take NASA a decade to build its own capsule and get astronauts back in space. So what happens now at NASA? What is happening now? I'm here at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, opening the doors to shed light on the future of human space travel. Music This is Robonaut 2. He's a collaboration between NASA, GM. There's a guy exactly, almost exactly like this up in space right now. This is in Houston, and NASA tests out new routines, new behaviors. Then they ship them over to another lab where they have an exact replica of Robonaut that's on the space station where they finalize the routine. Then they beam that up space, and they do it for real. Music Well, the whole idea behind Robonaut is to provide an assistant for crew. A Robonaut could work side by side with the crew, like a nurse to a doctor, or he could also take down all the tools and everything, all the infrastructure after a particular task is completed. I think it's important to keep in mind that Robonaut is a tool. Many people talk about science fiction robots and how they can go and do things on their own. Robonaut has been designed specifically to be a tool for people. It only does what we tell it to do, and it's been designed with the safety and the reliability to be a useful tool around people, not to go off and do anything on its own. I'm just going to show you a quick little scene from National Treasure 3. At the start of the movie, Nicholas Cage is sent to space using one of the Russian vehicles that currently takes astronauts to space because the space shuttle has been decommissioned. And he's looking for the lost U.S. Constitution, and unknown to the other astronauts, sends Robonaut outside the space station to retrieve the Constitution. And so Robonaut can fold back the thermal blanket that's hiding the U.S. Constitution, and Nicholas Cage, back inside the space station, because Nicholas Cage doesn't know how to spacewalk, is like, oh, thanks, Robonaut. I will take the U.S. Constitution to the President of the United States and ask him, why did you hide this in the space station? Well, why don't you look in the envelope? Why don't you look in the envelope? It's not the Constitution, it's just the photo. So this is called the RoboGlove, an exoskeleton for your hand. It's basically designed to help you grab things and make you stronger. In the glove itself, here on the thumb, we have something called a force sensor resistor. We actually actuate the tendons, and we pull them down and then release them when you let go of the FSR. And that's what gives you the extra power to lift an object, like a heavyweight or something. I can lift heavyweights all by myself, I want you guys to know. Very capable of lifting heavyweight. Sure. I'm here in front of the Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle. And so this is a capsule with a dead body mounted to the outside. So explain, you're telling me this is like a modular system. So that's where Multi-Mission comes in. The chassis is effectively a robot. This robot has wheels and that moves around. The payload is the cabin. So can I drive it? Yeah, let's hop in. All right. So what do I do? I'm the pilot now? You're the pilot, so pretty much push the stick in the direction you want to travel and the vehicle will do what it needs to do to get there. Here we go. So you'll notice we're not just tipping into it. So right now if you were outside, you'd see it forcing this right wheel down into that hole. This is incredible. This is really incredible. It doesn't make any sense. It's just like I'm going in a weird random direction and I'm floating and I'm bobbing. The computer itself won't allow you to do things that are going to jeopardize the safety of the robot. As you're going over the hill, you're starting to pick up more speed because your vehicle weighs a lot. But the wheels notice that and say, well, I'm only getting a command of one meter per second, and it slows you down. So you maintain that speed. Oh, man. I just feel like it's like just getting me out of a pinch every time. That is the goal. I'm just being rescued basically by a robot. We can venture over to Mars if you want. Yeah, let's do it. I'm sick of the moon. Can we go through the water? Yeah. Yes. Pretty sure there's life down there. I saw a dragonfly. Not anymore. That's our C300. It's a $16,000 camera. I'm going to run over it. I'm going to close my eyes and you're going to tell me to go straight. And you tell me when to stop. Okay. Ready? Yeah. Push your stick forward. My eyes are closed. Stick is forward. We're doing it. It's looking good. Oh, my gosh. It's probably not quite centered, but I'll close them up. I think we made it. $16,000. I don't see anybody in the cameras crying. It's okay. It's okay. We probably ought to back off. You should look at the rear view camera. This is the space vehicle mockup facility where they have space vehicle mockups within the facility. This is Orion. This is NASA's next generation space capsule. So this is how we would get back from the moon or Mars or wherever we go next. This is how we land back on Earth. But you could live in here for a while. Four people could be in here if they really liked each other. Could be in here for 21 days. Basically, this room is awesome and I'm going to live here. NASA, Johnson Space Center, visitor, Miller, Paul Josiah, expires Wednesday, October 17th. That's today. Some say space is the final frontier. And, you know, that's a way, a final frontier, that's a lot. It's like in Little House on the Prairie when they, you know, they moved to the little cabin in the big woods, but that wasn't far enough. So they moved further to the Little House on the Prairie. And, you know, and then one day we found an ocean. Who knew? An ocean. On the whole other side of the country there's an ocean this whole time. And I think space is like that. The scientists that I met today in Houston at NASA are, they're working on human space flight. We are not there yet, but we're working on it. And that's cool.