NASA PLAN TO COPY SPACE ODDITY ARCHIVE
NASA PLAN TO COPY SPACE ODDITY SOFTWARE

'As far as control of the vehicle, we don't have access to any critical components or mission critical software onboard,' Nikolaus told Mashable. Want more science and tech news delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories newsletter today.įor the most part, the virtual assistant will answer queries, like 'Alexa, how fast is Orion traveling?' and 'Alexa, what's the temperature in the cabin?' The only thing the system can actually control are the lights, said Justin Nikolaus, an Alexa voice designer on the project. Cameras mounted all over Orion will monitor how the system is working.

Cisco will run its software on an iPad in the capsule. Mission control also will use video-conferencing software provided by Cisco Webex (Opens in a new tab) inside the spacecraft. Whether a virtual assistant is integrated into the spacecraft for those expeditions depends on a successful demonstration during Artemis I. But the inaugural 42-day spaceflight (Opens in a new tab), testing various orbits and atmosphere reentry, will clear the way for NASA to send a crew on subsequent missions. No astronaut will actually be onboard Orion for this first mission - unless the dummy in the cockpit (Opens in a new tab) counts. Howard Hu, NASA’s Orion deputy program manager, and Brian Jones, Lockheed Martin’s chief engineer for the Callisto project, observe signals from the Orion spacecraft at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a connectivity test. The companies are paying for the technology - not NASA.Ī custom Alexa system built specifically for the spacecraft will have access to some 120,000 data readouts - more than astronauts have had before, with some bonus information previously only available within Houston's mission control. The project, named Callisto after one of Artemis' favorite hunting companions in Greek mythology, is programmed to give crew live answers about the spacecraft's flight status and other data, such as water supply and battery levels. That flexibility might even keep them safer, engineers say.Īn experiment to test the technology is riding along with Artemis (Opens in a new tab) on its first spaceflight. Rather, Lockheed Martin and its collaborators believe having a voice-activated virtual assistant and video calls in the spacecraft would be more convenient for astronauts, affording them access to information away from the crew console. I can't open the pod bay doors.That's the first thing that everybody said when we first suggested this.' 'We don't want the HAL 9000, 'I'm sorry, Dave. 'That's the first thing that everybody said when we first suggested this.' I can't open the pod bay doors,'' Chambers told Mashable. Such claims work to reinforce fears long embedded in popular culture - that one day the advanced technology enabling humans to achieve extraordinary things could be too smart, perhaps leading to machines that are self aware and want to hurt people.

NASA PLAN TO COPY SPACE ODDITY ARCHIVE

Credit: Photo by CBS Photo Archive / Getty Images Kirk on Star Trek talks to the Starship Enterprise computer. The story sparked a global conversation about whether some artificial intelligence is - or could be - conscious. developer Blake Lemoine, formerly of Google, went public with his belief that a chatbot he helped build had become sentient. That's not merely a concern raised through science fiction. Unlike the collegial computer in Star Trek, 'HAL' starts to glitch, takes control of the spacecraft, and then fights the crew's attempts to shut it down. But it wasn't nearly that simple, said Rob Chambers, Lockheed's director of commercial civil space strategy.īeyond technical constraints, they had to overcome the menacing representations of an inflight space computer, in the vein of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. When Lockheed Martin, the company that built the new Orion spacecraft (Opens in a new tab) for NASA, first dreamed up the talking computer, engineers figured they'd just throw an Amazon Echo Dot on the dashboard with a laptop and call it a day. sidekick might help on those long voyages. After all, boldly going where no one has gone before could be lonely, and having an A.I. With NASA reviving its human space exploration program through Artemis, it seems only natural real astronauts of the 2020s who will crew the forthcoming space missions would do the same. Captain Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the Star Trek gang were in constant dialogue with the onboard Enterprise computer, asking it questions about the starship and their alien environments.

Nasa plan to copy space oddity