AI Key to Unlocking New Space Applications.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin
• Position: Algorithmic Warfare

* Experts say artificial intelligence--which has wide applications across the military, civil and private sectors--will be critical to furthering space technology as the cosmos becomes more contested.

"The space environment continues to rapidly evolve," said Melanie Stricklan, CEO of Slingshot Aerospace, a space simulation and analytics company based in Austin, Texas, and El Segundo, California. "We continue to proliferate with new users and capabilities, new sensors both on orbit looking down, and on the Earth looking back up at space."

Artificial intelligence can improve space domain awareness, accelerate command-and-control decisions as well as inject resiliency into satellites and their corresponding networks, she said during an online panel discussion hosted by Booz Allen Hamilton.

"There's a lot of limitations for space today, but I think AI solutions really offer a transformative opportunity for ... the protect-and-defend mission on the defense side [and] for improving operations on the commercial side," Stricklan said.

Officials with the burgeoning Space Force--which will soon celebrate its second birthday--have said artificial intelligence will be a key future technology.

To enhance efficiency, the service plans to establish a digital foundation that will support rapid, data-driven decision-making and "unburden" its workforce from legacy staffing and coordination activities that could be better accomplished through automation, the Space Force said in its "Vision for a Digital Service" document, which was released in May.

"We will exploit machine learning and augmentation where appropriate, allocating monotonous staffing activities to artificial intelligence routines or robotic process automation and thus freeing up Guardians to train, educate and wargame as part of their drive to become a world-class fighting force," the document said.

Quentin Donnellan, general manager for space and defense at Hypergiant, an enterprise AI company with several offices in Texas, said the United States needs to leverage the uniqueness of its orbital assets as it considers how to apply AI to space systems.

Satellites "collect data globally, in real time, all the time, persistently, intermittently, in different wavelengths [and] above the clouds," he said. Adding a layer of artificial intelligence into the systems will allow the military and critical infrastructure entities to glean new insights, he added.

Shayn Hawthorne, space technology lead at...