In what might be a first in spaceflight history, the next crew to launch to the International Space Station has adopted a mission patch that began with ideas generated by an AI (artificial intelligence).
The use of a computer system to perform a task that has usually required human creatively is still new in the field of space exploration, despite it generally being a leader in emerging technology. The use of AI to create a crew patch — the 170th such insignia to represent a NASA astronaut mission since 1965 — may be more of a “small step” than a “giant leap,” but it was distinctive enough to be highlighted in the official description of the emblem.
“The SpaceX Crew-10 patch was thoughtfully designed by the 4-person crew. They used AI for initial inspiration, while the ever-irreplaceable human perfected the design and brought the patch to fruition,” reads the caption published by NASA’s Space Flight Awareness office.
Crew-10 pilot Nichole Ayers spearheaded the process of creating the patch on behalf of her crewmates, commander Anne McClain of NASA and mission specialists Takuya Onishi of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and Kirill Peskov with Russia’s federal space corporation Roscosmos.
Related: SpaceX Dragon capsule arrives at launch site for Crew-10 astronaut flight to ISS (photos)
“I am not an artist, I’m a mathematician,” said Ayers on Friday (March 7) as she and her crewmates took part in their pre-launch press conference at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “AI is a really cool tool that we get to use to help us brainstorm, so my husband and I sat down and we just started typing out things in an AI image generator.”
The resulting renderings included different style mythological dragons with their wings outstretched, and a couple of designs were multi-sided polygons. Another version had a large “X” drawn as glowing contrails over Earth.
“We wanted to highlight the fact that all four of us are professionally trained pilots, which is why the wings are featured on the patch and then the ascending and descending trajectory in the form of a Roman numeral ‘X’ for Crew-10. There was [also the idea of having] 10 sides to the patch,” said Ayers, replying to a question from collectSPACE.com. “So it was just kind of a booster for the brainstorm.”
Ayers then took the AI concepts to an artist who has previously helped more than a dozen other crews arrive at their final patch designs.
‘No need to reinvent the wheel’
“When Nichole first approached me, she had four different renderings that she liked,” Blake Dumesnil, a senior art director and graphic designer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in an interview with collectSPACE. “It was a situation where the crew liked an element from one design and another element from another one and wanted to splice some of them together.”
The AI concepts were helpful, said Dumesnil, particularly because some elements could be used as is.
“I took what she said and polished it up, very literally, to what was there in the rendering because they, as a crew, had already agreed that they liked it,” he said. “I didn’t see the need to reinvent the wheel on that, so some of it was just a matter of tracing what was there.”
Still, what the AI was able to produce was not perfect. The crew, for example, wanted the wings of the dragon to extend beyond the border of the patch, and the design as a whole had to be confined to a limited number of colors so it could be embroidered.
There was also the matter of meeting NASA’s standards, which led into an extended back and forth about the color of the dragon and avoiding that it looked like it was menacing the space station.
“This patch probably took me longer in terms of start to actual finished approval, longer than any other design I’ve done,” said Dumesnil, but added that that was not the fault of using AI.
“Honestly, the fact that what Nichole started with as a concept, rather than giving me a napkin sketch, what she gave me was a very nice, polished set of AI renderings. Once we started going down the path of mixing the elements that we liked, the AI stuff never really played into it. From from that point forward, it was just a starting point,” he said.
Related: Safety first: NASA pledges to use AI carefully and responsibly
“So I would not say that the design as you see it now could be attributed to being the first AI-generated mission patch or anything like that, because it was still all hand drawn. The final design really is its own thing, but the AI concepts absolutely provided us with a starting point,” Dumesnil told collectSPACE.
‘Hard to design something less applicable’
A “starting point” could also be used to describe the general state of where AI is in terms of its use at NASA. Within the last few years, the agency has started experimenting with using AI to design custom mission hardware, calibrate multi-wavelength images of the sun and adapt complex glass manufacturing processes for their use in microgravity. Last year, the space agency appointed its first artificial intelligence (AI) officer as an expansion of its chief data officer’s role.
For the most part, though, AI has yet to find a use in human spaceflight.
“It would be hard to design something less applicable in some ways than what we do in human spaceflight, because we do these huge one-off missions, whereas AI oftentimes does its best work when it can be trained on lots and lots of data that can be applied to a problem set,” said Christina Koch, a NASA astronaut assigned to Artemis 2, the first human mission planned to fly to the moon in more than 50 years. Koch made her remarks about AI on Friday during the audience Q&A segment of a keynote presentation at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas.
NASA has been researching ways to incorporate AI into its spaceflight programs, but the effort is relatively recent and has yet to deliver results. One possibility, said Koch, may be using AI to predict when crews should be more vigilant based on the thousands of commands that have been entered while operating the International Space Station for the past 25 years.
“The other place I think it’s really possible is when you think about the combination of human and robotic planetary exploration,” said Koch. “Why not have it be all robotic? The real reason is just decision making. It is having the brain up there.”
“If we are able to offload some of that or make some of our robotics have some of that decision making to pick up the interesting rock, to hike in that direction, to say that looks cool over there and to avoid that back and forth that we currently have to do now — where humans on the ground, based on just pictures or imagery, have to make some of those decisions and then guide the robotics — I think that’s a really cool possibility,” she said.
‘Blend of human creativity and AI capability’
For his part, at least as it pertains to mission patch creation, Dumesnil also sees the promise of AI use advancing in the near future.
“I am still very much in favor of doing it the traditional way,” he said, “but we’re getting some newer, younger crews, and they, just generally, generationally, might embrace some of this technology more than the crew members that have been around for a while. And if they want to work that way, I think that’s fine.”
“I don’t see it as a threat necessarily to doing what I do. I think that there is still a personal aspect to it that the crew members might want to have with a designer to really hone in on what they’re trying to create,” Dumesnil told collectSPACE. “But I think as a conceptualization tool, sure, I think AI can be very useful.”
“And sometimes, when you know the crews are wanting to get their designs done more quickly and they don’t have as much time, it could end up being a time saver,” he said.
As it turns out, an AI agreed as well. Although it is unknown which software Ayers used, given that it is a SpaceX mission and Elon Musk founded both the spaceflight company and the AI, collectSPACE posed the question to Grok, the generative artificial intelligence chatbot with direct access to the X social network.
“I think it’s a fascinating blend of human creativity and AI capability!” replied Grok, when asked its thoughts about using it to design a mission patch. “Using AI to brainstorm mission patch ideas shows how technology can amplify imagination, especially in a field like space exploration where innovation is key.”
“It’s cool that astronauts, who are already pushing boundaries by venturing into space, are also embracing tools like AI to symbolize their missions,” it said.
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