Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Forget humans, Russia wants a gunslinging robot piloting its spacecraft

Dallon Adams
By

russian gunslinging robot to space station fedor 2
The Cold War may be over but that hasn’t stopped either the United States or Russia from covertly testing the latest and gravest of military weaponry — especially in orbit around our planet. The U.S. has been accused of spying on the Chinese space station with its remote-controlled space plane and recently, Russia launched a mysterious unregistered sensor with potential military applications to the space station. That said, it looks like the Russians are upping the astronomical ante by sending its gunslinging humanoid robot to outer space — but don’t worry, they say it’s super chill.

Earlier in 2017, the state-funded Russian Foundation for Advanced Research Projects unveiled the anthropomorphous robot known as FEDOR — an acronym for Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research. If that name seems simultaneously ominous and terrifying, you should check out FEDOR’s death skills highlight reel. In demonstrations, FEDOR has the ability to blast bullets via dual pistols, perform army crawls, drive a car, and even make time to pump a little iron in pure Vladimir Putin fashion.

Related Videos

Russian Deputy Prime Minister and Deputy Head of the Military-Industrial Commission Dmitry Rogozin later tweeted: “Robot FEDOR showed the ability to shoot from both hands. Fine motor skills and decision-making algorithms are still being improved.”

Twitter/DmitryRogozin

The deputy later attempted to gloss things over via Facebook to let everyone know that the video was by no means a showing of overt aggression and instead simply a demonstration of the bot’s dexterity and the utilized decision-making algorithms. On Monday, November 20, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, announced that FEDOR would be piloting the Federatsiya spacecraft into orbit in 2021. Eventually, Roscosmos plans to use the Federatsiya craft to carry astronauts to the moon and potentially one day to Mars.

Currently, the cyber cosmonaut is set to begin preliminary pilot training for the Federatsiya in 2020 and could join the International Space Station as soon as 2024, according to project director Sergei Hurs. It’s still too early to tell how FEDOR will perform in the unforgiving vacuum of space but at the moment, the robot looks like a regular jack-of-all-trades.

“This thing can work without a space suit, live not only in a crew vehicle but even outside it,” explained Rogozin.

With this in mind, robots will inevitably one take our jobs and claim dominion over our planet but in the interim, at least there is now the potential for us to witness a robot pilot a spaceship and even potentially ghost ride the celestial whip en route to Mars.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
NASA’s Lunar Flashlight satellite won’t make it to its planned orbit
This illustration shows NASA’s Lunar Flashlight carrying out a trajectory correction maneuver with the Moon and Earth in the background. Powered by the small satellite’s four thrusters, the maneuver is needed to reach lunar orbit.

This week has seen good news for one NASA moon mission, as the CAPSTONE satellite recovered from a communications issue, but bad news for another. The Lunar Flashlight mission, which is intended to search the south pole of the moon for water ice, now won't make it to its planned orbit.

This illustration shows NASA’s Lunar Flashlight carrying out a trajectory correction maneuver with the Moon and Earth in the background. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Read more
See a stunning field of galaxies captured by James Webb Space Telescope
A crowded field of galaxies throngs this Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, along with bright stars crowned with Webb’s signature six-pointed diffraction spikes. The large spiral galaxy at the base of this image is accompanied by a profusion of smaller, more distant galaxies which range from fully-fledged spirals to mere bright smudges. Named LEDA 2046648, it is situated a little over a billion light-years from Earth, in the constellation Hercules.

Stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope continue to entrance, and recently the researchers using the telescope have shared a gorgeous image of a field of galaxies as part of the Webb Picture of the Month collection.

The image shows a spattering of different background galaxies, while the foreground shows bright individual stars and a bright spiral galaxy at the bottom called LEDA 2046648. Located around a billion light-years from Earth, this galaxy is relatively much closer to us than the far-off background galaxies which is why it is so prominent in the image.

Read more
Watch highlights of NASA’s second spacewalk of 2023
Earth as seen from the space station.

NASA has successfully completed its second spacewalk of the year at the International Space Station (ISS).

NASA astronaut Nicole Mann and Japan's Koichi Wakata of NASA counterpart JAXA spent 6 hours and 41 minutes outside the orbital outpost on Thursday before returning inside at 2:26 p.m. ET.

Read more