Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) disruptive potential has consumed the terrestrial world, especially with the arrival of large language models like ChatGPT that are rewriting the nature of work and what’s possible from an efficiency standpoint.
Excelling at processing and analyzing large data sets, AI is poised to be similarly transformative in space in areas such as exploration, in-space servicing, command-and-control decision making, and more resilient communications. AI-powered tools are bringing new levels of autonomy for everything from spacecraft and crew health monitoring to satellite navigation, collision avoidance and situational awareness at a time when the end game for the United States is ensuring a stable and sustainable space domain, even as threats to that domain continue to escalate.
The threat to the United States’ historic space dominance is real, contends Audrey Schaffer, vice president of Policy and Strategy at Slingshot Aerospace, who last year held the post of space policy director for the National Security Council staff in the Biden White House.
Noting that China intends to launch several large-scale constellations that collectively could amount to 35,000 satellites in orbit, Schaffer says, “This isn’t some far-off future hypothetical problem that the government might one day have to grapple with. It’s a problem at our doorstep.”
She adds that analyzing data from so many spacecraft simultaneously “is beyond what a human analyst or teams of analysts can do, at least in operationally relevant timelines the Space Force operates in.”
It’s no surprise that Space Force officials continue to call for more AI and machine learning investments to maintain the country’s air and space superiority.
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