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Sci-fi authors and screenwriters have long envisioned AI companions helping humans as they explore the cosmos. Sometimes things go well (Commander Data was a friendly and reliable Starfleet officer), other times not so much ("I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave").
Now, AI-assisted spacefaring -- like so many other concepts that, not so long ago, seemed utterly far-fetched -- could soon become a practical reality.
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In a paper posted to the preprint server site arXiv in May, three AI researchers showed how large language models (LLMs) could be deployed to help humans on the ground pilot a spacecraft. Researchers harnessed OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and Meta's LLaMA "to develop an intelligent agent capable of controlling a spacecraft in real time," they wrote in the paper.
Successful space navigation -- whether you're remotely piloting a satellite or internally controlling a vessel -- requires a vast amount of telemetry, or a collection of disparate data points coming from a multitude of sources, to determine and control for critical metrics like velocity and attitude.
The paper suggests LLMs could help humans accumulate this data, similar to how the algorithms behind self-driving cars continuously react to obstacles in the environment and adjust their course accordingly.
How AI could help drive spaceships
The authors' use of LLMs means that their system is entirely operable through natural language prompts. A human pilot on the ground, for example, might instruct the system not to "apply rotation throttles" in the event that the vessel is determined to be properly positioned; if it isn't, then an alternative prompt instructs the system to use the thrusters to make the required correction.
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