Tsiolkovsky’all

It’s the odds-on favorite for the next generation of radiation-hardened space computers (HPSC). Potential to be a 25x improvement over current capabilities. Guessing most of the use cases will be niche like that, but who knows.

The Starship concept of operations requires 11 launches for each mission to the moon - one for the vehicle, another 10 to refuel it once it get into earth orbit. Each of these missions have to autonomously dock and perform a cryogenic fuel transfer.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, has shown an operationally-viable in-space cryo transfer. Even doing it on Earth is a fussy thing - cryo transfer was behind two of the Artemis I scrubs, and NASA’s been doing it since Apollo.

Getting one Starship into orbit is an interesting milestone but it’s a long way from what they promised the world they could do… and the clock is ticking.

I call shenanigans. A fully autonomous space vehicle is three miracles away - we need a revolution in avionics to get systems capable of running computationally-expensive models, a revolution in sensor technology to allow for dense state knowledge of satellite systems without blowing mass and volume budgets, and we need a revolution in AI/ML that makes onboard collision avoidance and system upkeep viable.

I do believe that someone has pre-trained a model on vegetation and terrain features, has put that model up on a cube sat, and is using it to “autonomously” identify features of interest. I do believe someone has duct-taped a LLM to the ground systems to allow for voice interaction. I do not agree that those features indicate a high level of autonomy on the spacecraft.