NASA will shortly launch a humanoid robot called Robonaut 2 aboard one of the last space shuttles to dock with the International Space Station, where it will take up residence.

Robots have been used widely throughout the space programmes of the US and Russia, with robotic craft exploring the solar system and the surfaces of Mars and the Moon. The craft that explored Mars as part of the Pathfinder mission in 1997 was named Sojourner, for Sojourner Truth, a former slave who later campaigned for the abolition of the slave trade in Civil War era America.

The word robot is a Czech word that means slave and the theme of slavery seems imbued throughout space race. The father of the Soviet space programme, Sergei Korolyov, was imprisoned in a gulag in the late 1930s and forced to work in inhumane conditions in Siberia. At the close of World War 2, both the Soviets and the Americans were eager to take Nazi scientists and their equipment from the V2 rocket programme – no questions asked – despite the creation of the V2s at Mittelwerk claiming the lives of about 20,000 slaves from Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp that supplied workers to the project.

Without these nameless victims, and the technology they contributed to, the Americans and Soviets might not have made such quick advances in rocketry and a Moon landing probably wouldn’t have been possible as early as 1969. At the end of the war, then General Dwight D. Eisenhower advised his bosses in Washington that ‘the V2 rocket scientists are ’25 years ahead – recommend the very best men be evacuated to the U.S. immediately.’

Perhaps it could be said that the space race began in 1945 with the push to get Nazi scientists out of Germany before war crimes trials and the post-War dissection of the country made it impossible.

NASA left a plaque on the surface of the Moon when Apollo XI landed there in 1969 with the message ‘we came in peace for all mankind’. One of the new programmes under consideration for Robonaut is Project M, which aims to land a humanoid robot on the Moon within 1000 days of programme commencement. It might be fitting – if the project is greenlit and a Robonaut makes it to the Moon – that it could leave a plaque there to honour the thousands of human slaves who gave their lives in developing the rockets that were the foundation of the space programme.