1985 – Manned Autonomous Work Station (MAWS) by Brand Griffin.
For more detail see Griffin’s pdf here.
Image and text sourced from drell-7.
“With restrictions put on by current EVA technology, there’s no such thing as being able to put on your spacesuit, go out the airlock and deal with an emergency these days. A minimum of about 20 hours of slow decompression and prebreathing pure oxygen is required before anyone goes out into space. Thats because the cabin environment of the Space Station, and the Shuttle is oxygen/nitrogen at sea level pressure, while the suits operate with pure oxygen at 5 p.s.i. They do that because, with present, vintage 1980 space suits, the arms and legs become impossible to bend if the pressure is any greater. The other problem is radiation shielding. For long stays outside, or any meaningful work beyond the Earth’s ionosphere, the present suits just have inadequate radiation protection.
The potential solution is Manned Autonomous Work Station (MAWS.) It will have the same internal pressure as the station, or whatever long duration habitat we have in the future, because it doesn’t have flexible joints. Instead it uses a couple of miniature versions of the station’s robot arm. Its possible to put much better radiation shielding around MAWS, too. Probably the first exploration of asteroids or moons of Mars will be done in something like this design.
So this is the baseline look of the MAWS, as loosely worked out by NASA.”
Artist: Paul Hudson
Possibly an early depiction of the MAWS. This one by Robert McCall.
MAWS updated to FlexCraft in 2010.
See other early Space Teleoperators here.
See other early Lunar and Space Robots here.