Don't say HAL
AI will make robots more capable, but it will not replace human crews. If anything, AI may be essential to expanding humanity’s presence farther from Earth. Just as more distant or complex robotic missions can depend on AI to replace mission control, space stations and crewed deep-space missions can use onboard intelligence to rely less on a distant home planet.
Already, AI has acted as a personal assistant to astronauts aboard the International Space Station. A computer powered by IBM’s Watson AI made the trip twice in the past few years, taking a first step toward future AI astronaut helpers. Another assistant, this one based on a large language model similar to ChatGPT, will soon be tested by ESA on Earth.
Update in progress...
There is still a lot to figure out, though, before AI starts commanding entire missions or helping astronauts in deep space.
For one, AI methods can be hard to trust. Smarter algorithms often function in ways that aren’t transparent, and since AI methods are meant to respond to a huge variety of conditions, testing them is difficult. Unlike a self-driving car, an AI-enabled spacecraft can’t be crash-tested around a warehouse. Future systems will probably be proven almost entirely through computer simulations. Research shows that these methods could be enough to show that AI systems are ready to fly, but this part of the field is only just getting started.
Yet the biggest roadblock to adopting AI for space exploration may not be issues with the technology itself but with how it fits into space agencies. This is not new. In 1980, a panel of experts chaired by Planetary Society co-founder Carl Sagan published a report criticizing NASA’s attitude toward machine intelligence and robotics, calling it “conservative and unimaginative.” Since computer science is so essential to space exploration, the panel argued, NASA should act as an incubator for it. Otherwise, the agency will have to wait for private companies to invent new technology and then adopt it, rather than developing their own systems tailored to the needs of exploration.
Today, NASA is no AI incubator, but it’s not stuck in the past. It also has a very different relationship with the private sector. The agency launched an AI research partnership with Nvidia, Google Cloud, and other leading organizations in 2016, well before the recent jump in AI’s popularity. NASA has built some AI methods into recent missions, and it established its own chief AI officer in 2024.
Still, NASA and other space agencies have done little to apply AI to spacecraft operations more broadly. Some experts argue that this might require a change in how agencies think about their missions. Officials would have to view AI as a way to improve a mission’s reliability instead of just adding risk, spacecraft and instrument teams would have to work together more closely than they do now, and agencies would have to invest in AI on more than a mission-by-mission basis.
As science challenges us to expand where we might boldly go and the discoveries we might boldly make, the impact AI could have on space exploration will only grow — and so will the reasons for agencies to make these kinds of changes.
After all, we don’t know whether the first major discovery to depend on AI will come from a moon of Saturn, a nearby star, or somewhere else entirely. But with the right support, AI will provide a way of knowing the Cosmos unlike any we have ever had before.