RandomBLAM! Phil Coulson, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Becomes a Real-World Iron Man

Move over Tony Stark, Nick Fury's right hand man was a special guest at Raytheon's XOS 2 Exosuit Demonstration in Salt Lake City, Utah. It's a Marvel What If? story waiting to happen...

CBR News was recently invited to the Raytheon Sarcos facility in Salt Lake City, Utah, for the unveiling of the defense armament company's second generation robotic exo-skeleton; dubbed the XOS 2. The mechanized combat suit is being developed to alleviate the heavy burden ground troops trudge around with day in and day out. Frasier Smith, vice president of operations at Raytheon Sarcos, explained:

"The backpacks are getting heavier. They also have a collection of gear that [the military would] like the person to carry to increase their survivability. So there is this battle going on about how much you can burden the guy with where it doesn't start being deleterious. The whole point of [the soldier] using the lower extremity was to abate the need to carry a 200 hundred pound backpack, and now you have that penalty associated with carrying that stuff...The person can walk with [the XOS 2] all day and not get fatigued,"

And who better to test out this future-tech than one of America's finest, albeit fictitious, government operatives: Agent Phil Coulson of the clandestine (and again, fictitious) organization S.H.I.E.L.D. Well... the actor who plays him at least. Clark Gregg was onsite to test out the gear personally,

"I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know if we were going to come in and see some kind of giant freight moving version of the thing that Sigourney Weaver wore in 'Aliens.' This is much more nimble and very much clearly a stepping stone to something that's going to be in use with contemporary soldiers in, I would guess, the next ten or twenty years if not sooner."

To read more details about the XOS 2, visit ComicBookResources via the link below. Without further ado, here's Agent 'Iron' Coulson: