SpaceX, the space company of Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive officer (CEO), is drawing attention with what would be the largest initial public offering (IPO) ever.
In a 17-minute promotional video recently released to retail investors, SpaceX laid out a blueprint to leap into a "space-based AI infrastructure corporations" that spans space launch vehicles, satellite communications, and artificial intelligence (AI). In the long term, it said it will launch data centers in space and push ahead with asteroid mining, energy production on the moon and Mars, and even a Mars migration project. It is being seen as symbolic in that a private corporations has opened the door to a "great age of navigation in space" for the first time.
Issa Nesnas, chief robotics lead at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), called Musk's space vision, which evokes science fiction (SF) novels, "a very ambitious goal." Nesnas, who visited Korea to attend the 17th Asian Leadership Conference (ALC) held at the Shilla Hotel in Jung-gu, Seoul at the end of last month, said in an interview with ChosunBiz, "Elon Musk is a visionary and has achieved remarkable results through SpaceX, but there are still many challenges to solve to realize goals such as a human migration to Mars or building space data centers."
In the harsh space environment, robots must build bases on the moon and Mars in place of people and transport rocks and more, but it is difficult to achieve right now because robots are not yet advanced enough to build sophisticated facilities from start to finish. He said, "Even infrastructure on Earth is still mostly built by people, not robots," adding, "With current technology, we could build parts of the initial space infrastructure, but to move to the next stage, we need technological breakthroughs in robots."
However, he predicted that as AI and Robotics, which have emerged as core technologies in space exploration, are advancing rapidly, and if investment related to the space industry becomes active with the SpaceX listing as a starting point, the great space age once seen only in movies could arrive sooner than expected.
Nesnas said, "Going forward, humans and robots will work more closely to build a base on the moon and set out for voyages to Mars and deep space," adding, "AI will enhance the 'autonomous exploration' capabilities of spacecraft and robots, opening opportunities to explore unknown realms that humanity has not been able to reach until now." He leads the autonomy driving section in a precursor project for "Endurance," a lunar exploration rover mission at JPL that will collect surface samples from the far side of the moon and return them, and is an expert with more than 25 years of experience in robots and autonomous systems.
NASA and private corporations use AI to analyze data collected in space, but going forward, spacecraft and rovers equipped with AI will more efficiently and autonomously explore extreme environments that are hard for humans to reach and will become powerful tools that assist astronauts' work. He explained, "The reason AI is important in space exploration is that it can help complete missions by responding to uncertainties faced by probes in unfamiliar environments such as the moon, Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa, and Saturn's icy moon Enceladus."
He cited JPL's precursor project for the "Endurance" lunar exploration as an example. The goal of this project is to collect samples of soil, rocks, and more from the massive South Pole–Aitken Basin—an impact crater on the far side of the moon the size of the United States—bring them back to Earth, and analyze them. The problem is that the far side of the moon is such a harsh environment that temperatures drop to minus 220 degrees Celsius at night, making it difficult for humans to move around directly. So a lunar base would be built at the south pole, where sunlight is abundant and conditions are favorable for human habitation, and a rover would be sent into the interior of the basin, where nights are long and sunlight is scarce, to collect samples, dividing up the work accordingly. When the rover transports the collected samples to the south pole base, astronauts will load them onto a spacecraft and bring them back to Earth.
Nesnas said, "The rover will have to travel 2,700 kilometers on the lunar surface, equivalent to the entire circumference length of the Republic of Korea, and a rover equipped with an AI system trained on the lunar environment will be able to autonomously and stably drive across the moon's rough terrain while predicting risks in advance without human intervention." Using AI offers many advantages in terms of safety and cost-effectiveness.
He also predicted that advances in AI and robotics would contribute to the growth of the asteroid mining industry that SpaceX has identified as a future business. He said, "If we secure the technology and experience to successfully explore the numerous asteroids that pass near Earth by using fully autonomous, AI-based spacecraft, it will open the way to securing the economics of deep space voyages, including to planets where there may be liquid oceans in the long term," adding, "Some asteroids are composed of water and minerals, which have value not only for scientific research but also for resource acquisition."
He added, "Given today's AI computing power, hardware capabilities, and simulation technology, autonomous asteroid exploration technology could be implemented in as little as five years."
He assessed SpaceX's plan to build a space AI data center positively, saying it could be a game changer that improves the economics of the space industry if successful. He said, "The advantage of a space data center is that it can receive sunlight 24 hours a day, so if you install solar panels, it can procure power on its own," adding, "But we need to develop semiconductors and storage devices that can withstand space radiation, and if the data center equipment breaks down, repairs are difficult."
On Musk's idea of a "human migration to Mars," he said it is premature, noting, "The most important task in the space industry right now is heading to the moon." He said, "It's not just about visiting the moon; it's about building a sustainable base there to establish a permanent residential foothold," adding, "It takes about three to four days to get to the moon, but three to six months to reach Mars, and because the atmosphere is too thin, it is hard to slow a heavy spacecraft, so the feasibility is still low."