Arguably the most famous AI in fictional universes, at least for space geeks like myself or movie lovers, would be HAL 9000 in 2001 Space Odyssey. The human-comparable machine intelligence was on-board Discovery on a Jupiter mission as the sixth crew member. It was a very memorable scene when HAL 9000 sang Daisy Bell as it was deactivated by David Bowman.

In the real universe, AI has already played important roles in space exploration. We are still far behind HAL 9000. However, I am confident that it will play increasingly greater roles in future exploration missions. In this article I will overview the current status of AI in space exploration, as well as expectations for the future.

In describing the latest version of the Pentagon’s “offset strategy,” senior U.S. defense officials have in recent months highlighted the military’s desire to leverage AI to develop autonomous weapons. That, Robert Work, deputy U.S. defense secretary, noted in a recent address, “is going to lead to a new era of human-machine collaboration and combat teaming.