Podcast: Space Exploration and Artificial Intelligence Featuring Dr. Wanda Curlee, Program Director, School of Business and Dr. Robert Gordon, Program Director, School of Business How is artificial intelligence supporting space exploration? In this episode, Dr. Wanda Curlee talks to Dr. Robert Gordon, the Program Director for Business at APU, about how Spacex, NASA, and other organizations are using Al. Learn how artificial intelligence is being used to collect and process massive amounts of data, assist with rocket design and troubleshooting, calculate complex mathematics, support space logistics, pilot and monitor space flights, and much more. Read the Transcript: Dr. Wanda Curlee: Welcome to the podcast Innovations in the Workplace. I'm your host, Wanda Curlee. Today we are going to be chatting about artificial intelligence, space logistics, and supply chain in this space area. There is a lot of activity now within NASA and SpaceX. The International Space Station has been staffed for many years. Space logistics is an absolute necessity. My guest is Dr. Robert Gordon, who is a Program Director at American Public University in the areas of military management, reverse logistics and government contracting and acquisition. He also has many years of experience with supply chain and industry, including Disney, Crystal Cruises, Sea Corp, Viking Cruises, to name a few. Robert, welcome back to Innovations in the Workplace. And thank you for joining me. Dr. Robert Gordon: Thank you, Wanda. It's always good to be here. I think that we have a very exciting topic this week, and I really look forward to discussing it with you and obviously, with the audience. Dr. Wanda Curlee: Absolutely. Absolutely. We just saw a commercial rocket take two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station and come back safely. It is exciting to see this partnership. However, I would expect supply chain for space must be quite intricate and interesting. How do you see artificial intelligence helping with predicting the supply chain needs for space? Dr. Robert Gordon: Well, artificial intelligence definitely plays a role and artificial intelligence is clearly being utilized in the design phase of the manned and unmanned flights that we're dealing with the International Space Station. Clearly, there's a lot of information that needs to be reviewed. And what people don't remember is that for all these successes that have happened recently, there've been many failures in the past. So every time there's a failure, an incident, be it an unmanned flight or a test flight, there's a lot of data that needs to be crunched through to really come up with what is the solutions to avoid those problems in the future. And this is where Al is very helpful, because there's so much data now with the telemetry that's gathered from these rockets that people need to take a look at it and crunch through it to figure out and precisely identify the area of failure. Keeping in mind that it might not be a single point of failure. You may be looking at a multiple incident or a cascade that causes the problem. So artificial intelligence helps go through that data, find the information, make those design corrections and keeps things moving along.Obviously, people are involved as well and people are reviewing it, but with all that information, one of the things that you see with SpaceX is that they're very fast about being able to recover from an incident. In the past where it was months to years, they are in weeks to months. If they have a problem, they work it. They figure out what the problem was and then they make the correction. So artificial intelligence is clearly helping with those flights to get us to these manned flights by looking at the successes and the failures of the unmanned tests, as well as the unmanned flights. Dr. Wanda Curlee: That's quite interesting, because I know NASA has had its problems in the past, and I'm sure they learned from it. And they may have even used artificial intelligence 20 years ago. But artificial intelligence now is so much faster than it was in the past. And of course, as you said, the human has to do the value-add. They've got to make the final decision. Artificial intelligence can give you patterns and visuals and recommendations. But again, as you said, it's finally the human that does that. So do you think Spacex used artificial intelligence to help design its rockets as well? Dr. Robert Gordon: Yes. In the design process, clearly they're using artificial intelligence to look at different options and different models. I know in particular there was one test flight that was a failure. They went back and they made one single adjustment to one mathematical equation before the next flight. And then that flight went smoothly. So sometimes it's a matter of figuring out precisely the area or the problem. It may seem very small. They indicated that the calculation error wasn't considered a problem, but they made the change to make sure that it eliminated that potential. So really humans are certainly looking and monitoring this and helping, but when it comes to these very difficult mathematical calculations, Al is certainly being involved in looking at, not only the possibilities, but also the probabilities. Dr. Wanda Curlee: Wow, that's fascinating. So how are supplies dealt with for flights with people? How about unmanned flights and does Al play a role in this? Dr. Robert Gordon: Yes, absolutely. What's happened is that, and again, the successes of this manned flight has overshadowed all the successful unmanned flights that occurred before this. Before the rockets and the systems were approved for human flight, there had already been a number of unmanned flights that were going to the International Space Station with SpaceX rockets. And for a lot of that, again, there's artificial intelligence being involved with the design, but also to some degree with troubleshooting, as well as also with to some degree with piloting and monitoring. Even in the crew Dragon that carried the individuals up to the space station, the crew acknowledged that the entire system and rocket and the entire voyage could have been done on the ground. Although they were clearly there to be there to help if there were any problems or unseen issues. If a standard mission goes as it should, everything could be done by the ground and between the people on the ground and artificial intelligence, they could just go on like an unmanned drone. Dr. Wanda Curlee: Hm, interesting. So do you see manned flights decreasing and unmanned flights increasing? Or will it be still a mixture? Dr. Robert Gordon: It's going to be a mix. It's going to continue to be mixed. However, I do see that the manned flights will increase and the reason being is now that there's another potential provider to send items up into space through SpaceX, there's going to be a lot more opportunity for people to go up there and come back.Dr. Robert Gordon: I see that it's going to continue to push and evolve it in many different areas, not only in the area of development, but also in support. Again, on the planet, you already see self-driving trucks supporting systems. You see Al being utilized in warehouses for more efficient picks. I see all this technology fundamentally going into space. And we put a base on the moon or Mars, the same technology is going to be used. Because if you imagine in space, water and air are probably the most precious commodities you have there. But the moment you add an Al in that doesn't need water or air, it becomes a much better proposal and much cheaper and much easier to handle and maintain. So I see Als expanding. In addition, for example, the Mars Rover, the latency between a command coming from earth going to Mars is about six minutes. And so commands go into the Mars Rover, it takes six minutes to get there, six minutes to confirm that it's being done. So with Al, you can eliminate that latency, because the Al can continue to go along its program and address anything that comes up, rather than waiting for this human latency for the communications to travel to Mars and back. Dr. Wanda Curlee: Wow. That's just fascinating what Al is going to be doing for space and the Space Force and for humankind. Because I see things that happen through the space program and NASA ended up with us, such as the microwave. So we've seen a lot of things that happen in space, and I see the space logistics and supply chain helping us terrestrially as well. Dr. Robert Gordon: Yep. Dr. Wanda Curlee: Robert, thank you very much for joining me today for this episode of Innovations in the Workplace. Dr. Robert Gordon: Thank you. Thank you for having me. And let me tell you that, although all these things are happening now, I'm sure that there's a lot more happening in the future. Dr. Wanda Curlee: I can imagine, and it will change in the future to something we didn't even think about. Dr. Robert Gordon: Absolutely. Dr. Wanda Curlee: And thank you to our listeners for joining us. Stay well