The NASA Robot That Failed to Do Its Job

A cautionary tale about the android who just wasn't suited for the task at hand
It looks so much like an intelligent robot that it hardly seems fair to call it a dummy. For decades it
languished in a warehouse at the National Air and Space Museums Paul E. Garber storage facility
in Suitland, Maryland, and no one knew what it was. It used to sit, covered with dust and filthy, in
a sort of homemade chair, for years and years, says NASM curator Paul Ceruzzi. Everybody,
every day would walk past it and sort of chuckle at it. And its like, What are we doing with this
thing?
The mystery was solved when Mike Slowik, a businessman in suburban Chicago, contacted
Ceruzzi. In the early 1960s, Slowiks late father, Joe, an engineer at the Illinois Institute of
Technology in Chicago, created an articulated dummy for NASA, to test astronaut spacesuits.
From that moment on, Ceruzzi recalls, I said, well, gee, this is actually pretty important.
In the early years of the Apollo program, NASA needed an objective way of evaluating different
spacesuit designs. The problem was a human subject could offer only subjective impressions, says
Joe Kosmo, a retired NASA suit engineer. I can get in a spacesuit and say, Yeah, its a little hard to
move...to flex the elbow takes a little more force than that other suit that had the different elbow.
But I couldnt give you numbers. I couldnt tell you the range of the motion and the degrees.
Joe Slowiks creation was a hydraulically powered figure weighing 230 pounds, its height
adjustable from 5 feet 6 inches to 6 feet 2 inches. Under its aluminum skin a network of nylon tubes
circulated oil at a pressure of 1,000 pounds per square inch. The high fluid pressure powered the
dummys hydraulic activators to move the joints. During testing at NASAs Manned Spacecraft
Center in Houston the dummy was suspended from the ceiling. Standing at a nearby console, an
operator could turn knobs to make the dummys 36 joints execute remarkably lifelike actions.
Sensors measured the precise motion and amount of force exerted by each joint.
It was impressive on the motions it could make, very humanlike motions, Kosmo recalls. In a
filmed demonstration, viewable below or on YouTube, the android performs leg lifts and arm raises,
runs in place, and swivels its hips like a slow-motion Elvis Presley. It could even shake hands. But
there was one nagging problem: It leaked. One of the great technical challenges had been that
hydraulic valves small enough to use in the dummy couldnt be made sufficiently strong to handle
the fluid pressure required to move the joints of a pressurized spacesuit. To contain the leaking oil,
Kosmo dressed the dummy in a scuba divers wet suit. But the problem was never solved, and the
dummy never got to do its job.
You couldnt place the dummy inside a one-of-a-kind spacesuit, says Kosmo, Leaking oil would
contaminate the suit. We didnt want to risk ruining a suit. (A single spacesuit would cost the
equivalent of $750,000 today.) Kosmo believes that a solution could have been found. But under the
looming end-of-the-decade deadline for sending humans to the moon, he explains, NASAs focus
was, how do you build a better spacesuit, not how do you build a better robot. Kosmo says NASA
had already spent an amount equaling almost $2 million today on the project, and youve got to
draw the line somewhere. Sometime in 1967 Kosmos boss told him, Get rid of it.
But there was still hope for Joe Slowiks dummy to reach its full potential. By 1968 it had found a
new home at Ohios Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where researchers in the bionics branch
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wanted to use it to create a true android. They planned to replace the dummys hydraulic actuators
with electronic ones. Most intriguing, they wanted to hook it up to a computer to create what they
called a learning machine. Well never know whether they would have succeeded; the bionics
branch was disbanded in late 1968. The dummy was later purchased at auction and donated to
NASM in 1986.
If Joe Slowik was frustrated by the fate of his creation, he didnt let on. He was very proud of it,
his son Mike says. In our family we referred to him as our long-lost brother, because my dad spent
so much time working on the darned thing we hardly saw him for a year or so. Today, with a
humanoid robotNASAs Robonaut 2aboard the International Space Station, it seems as if the
descendants of Joe Slowiks articulated dummy are hard at work in the real world.

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