Howdy there, fellow human. Do you want to go to space? Since you're reading Motherboard, I'm guessing you do. But unless you've got Lance Bass levels of cash, you can't afford it. But robots apparently can, and they're already spiking the proverbial football.That's Kirobo, a fairly famous Japanese bot, in the video above. The little guy—he's just 13 inches tall—scored a flight to the International Space Station, and has now become the first robot to deliver a message from space? What were the monumental words, you ask?"On August 21, 2013, a robot took one small step toward a brighter future for all," according to one translation. In other words: "Nyah, nyah, silly humans. Who's in orbit now?"Kirobo was launched to the ISS on August 10th, as part of a project to study how humans could interact with robots in space conducted in part by the University of Tokyo and Toyota. The only problem is that Kirobo only speaks Japanese, and there's currently no Japanese astronauts on board the ISS. (Japanese ISS veteran Koichi Wakata is set to return in a couple months.)That means that, at the moment, the ISS crew is living with a robot that no one can natively communicate with. Now, I'm not going to go about predicting the robo-apocalypse or anything—although the "brighter future for all" line sounds supsiciously robo-centric—but how insane would it be to be locked in a funky little space station and have this space Furby suddenly start yelling?Joking aside, the Kirobo Robo Project folks mean to look at how astronauts deal with robot companions during long-term space travel, and they've certainly set up fascinating study parameters. And it opens up an amazing avenue of development: Will we truly work side-by-side with bots as we travel the universe? It's looking more and more that way.@derektmead
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