Comment Re:Why space suits at all? (Score 1) 70
Have you ever looked at some of the equipment on the outside of the space station? Most of it is is quite delicate as opposed to oil rigs that are mostly very large steel pipes that you can pound on with a sledge hammer and do very little damage to. Everything on that space station is built as light as possible / practicable because it has to be pushed into orbit by chemical rockets.
Lots and lots of it is behind something else, lots of it has complex cable connections. The more robotics you send up that more and more things have to be designed to be accessed by those robotics and therefor become less compact which on the outside of a space station is not good since there is limited surface area all the crap that must be there to begin with.
They have yet to build anything with as much dexterity ( even in a space suite glove ) as the human hand. They have yet to build camera's that are as good as the human mark 1 mod 0 eyeball at catching sight of something, if even for the briefest of moments and reacting immediately to that, if required.
Quite simply put, there is not a robot built yet that can replace humans doing some of the most delicate and difficult tasks. Think about cross-threading. Even in a space suit you can feel that slight resistance of threads not quite aligned and stop twisting before you mangle them, stop, turn the thing in reverse a bit and feel the threads align and the resume turning the coupling, screw or bolt.
Every day they get closer, but for now there is not a manipulator that can do that. Remember repairing the Hubble and they had trouble with the access door closing? The guy in the suit could feel which section was not aligning correctly and apply pressure in a different vector to get the access door to click into place. I for one would be quite happy if they had a manipulator / robot that could do that since it would not require risking a life to do the work that needs to be done; however, until that day then people in those pesky suits are going to have to put em one, head out of the hatch and play mechanic in a very hostile environment.