While AI models are excellent at parsing massive amounts of data, they struggle to pivot when faced with unprecedented events — the kind that frequently occur in the vacuum of outer space. Space operations are a zero-tolerance environment where the cost of a software miscalculation can be a total loss of assets or human lives. The solution isn’t to abandon the technology, but to pivot toward human-assisted systems where an AI algorithm handles the heavy computational lifting while human experts serve as guides on the ground and remain the ultimate decision makers in aerospace technology. SN‘s Aaron Tremper takes us there.
🪐 Space isn’t a sandbox
Space agencies such as NASA are integrating AI into a human-supervised framework. This approach allows mission controllers to, for example, sift through scads of Mars terrain images to help a rover drive itself around obstacles. That’s a type of multistep task involving perception of a problem (like the Mars equivalent of a pothole), decision-making and physical execution. Robots in space use “autonomy stacks”, where different modules in charge of each step are linked together. This isn’t just a future scenario, it’s already standard procedure in NASA’s navigation, maintenance and data gathering operations.
🛰️ The orbiting market opportunity
This shift toward “augmented intelligence” — a collaborative model of artificial intelligence that focuses on empowering humans rather than replacing them — is opening a new niche in the burgeoning space economy, which is valued at more than $600 billion and projected to grow to $1.8
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