Space Brothers - Episode 73

With a potential place on a future lunar mission at stake, it's time for Mutta to put his money where his mouth is and impress the bigwigs with his new lunar rover design in this week's Space Brothers.

For all of the talk of flying cars both last week and this, Mutta's actual ideas to improve the rover are far more down to earth than that. As well as some tweaking to the suspension of the existing vehicles, the main gist of his ideas is a simple one - use Google Glass.

Okay okay, so it isn't literally to use Google Glass, but the concept is similar. While Mutta's flying car concept for Miracle Car was (understandably) rejected, one part of it which did excite his then employers was the concept of displaying virtual roads on the windscreen to manage the traffic and also acts as a navigation system.  With this concept now fleshed out into a system that is ready for production on cars, all that would be required is to fit a similar windscreen to the lunar rovers - with navigation data provided from 3D maps of the moon's surface created by a JAXA satellite, and with Miracle Car looking to produce the system in return for some good publicity, it seems as if Mutta has met all of the targets set for him with this particular task.  Is this going to be enough to get him to the moon?

For an episode that ostensibly didn't stray too far outside of a meeting room, this week's Space Brothers was once again great stuff - there's a lot of simple enjoyment to be had from watching Mutta craft an elegant and relatively simple solution to a problem, and to be quite honest I could probably watch that kind of thing on its own even without the show's space angle.  It isn't the high drama or human emotion that we've seen elsewhere in this series, but it ticks a very particular box for me that you can't really find elsewhere, which certainly goes some way to explaining why I'm still enjoying Space Brothers immensely even after well over a year of watching it week in, week out.