I fell in love with George Dyson about the time he was writing “Baidarka, the Kakak.”  I never read it, because it was so expensive, so I leafed through it in bookstores, but I DID read Kenneth Brower’s  “The Starship and the Canoe,” a “compare and contrast” between George and his father, Freeman, who was designing a space ship at the same time that George...

Robonaut, or Robonaut 2, is scheduled to be shot into orbit encased in a special case called the SLEEPR (Structural Launch Enclosure to Effectively-Protect Robonaut) from the Kennedy Space Center making it the first robotic astronaut to work in space. R2′s destination is the International Space Station where the crew will unpack it and set it to work. Originally...