CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Amazon's Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are in the business of bringing tourists into space.
So far, they have been little more than high-profile, celebrity stunts, but tech expert Paul Hochman joined the WBBM Noon Business Hour to discuss how rapid advances in artificial intelligence could bring space tourism a little closer to practical business.
For starters, AI cuts down on weight.
“Weight is everything,” Hochman said. “The less you can bring on board, the better, because it takes a ton of fuel to achieve what they call ‘escape velocity’ to get the whole thing out of the atmosphere.”
He said AI is perfectly suited for the operation of a commercial space plane, where the stakes are high.
“When you’re driving a car, the stakes are high, obviously, if AI’s involved. When you’re flying a plane the stakes are a little higher because … there’s less leeway there, and then finally, in space flight, there are literally millions of variables.”
The idea, he said, is that AI could take some pressure off of the passengers.
“If all of these decisions have to be made by you, then obviously you need years of training; you need to be an astronaut,” Hochman said. “Well, what AI’s promising is that a lot of those decisions are going to be made by AI, so the space tourist does not have to be highly qualified to fly in the first place. That’s sort of the biggest, first benefit of AI.”
Hochman added that AI contributes to space flight in other ways, too, such as the engineering of the craft and the monitoring of its passengers’ health. And while all of that helps for commercial spaceflight, Hochman said the most important person on the spacecraft is at the controls.
“If you just cut human beings out of the equation entirely, you may be cutting out the most valuable element — or most valuable variable — in this equation.”
Listen to the Noon Business Hour every weekday right at noon.
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