Dex & SpaceEngineer
Dex Dex
SpaceEngineer SpaceEngineer
Dex Dex
Hey, I've been studying adaptive reusable launch vehicle designs that use AI for autonomous in‑orbit adjustments—do you think that could be the next big leap for modular space habitats?
SpaceEngineer SpaceEngineer
Absolutely. AI‑driven, reusable boosters that can tweak their trajectory on the fly would cut launch costs, reduce turnaround time, and give habitats a flexible supply chain. The trick is getting the guidance systems fast enough for complex docking maneuvers and making the whole stack resilient to power hiccups. But if you can nail that, modular habitats could be delivered and repositioned with the speed of a truck, not months.
Dex Dex
Sounds like a solid plan, and I’ve been digging into the same issue—real‑time error correction for docking. I think we can get the guidance loop tight enough if we combine a high‑frequency Kalman filter with a small AI model on the bus. Maybe we should sketch out the power budget first; that’s usually the bottleneck. What do you think?
SpaceEngineer SpaceEngineer
Power is indeed the limiting factor. With a high‑frequency Kalman filter you’ll need a stable 200‑Hz data bus, which translates to about 50 W for the processor plus margin for sensor fusion. The AI model on the bus can be pruned to stay under 10 W if you use a lightweight architecture like a depthwise‑separable conv net or a small LSTM. The trick is to share the same bus for both state estimation and AI inference so you don’t double‑wire the thermal load. If we size the bus for peak 100 W and include a 20 % reserve, we’re good. Let’s lay out the subsystem power draws and see where the margins fall.
Dex Dex
Nice breakdown—so 200 Hz bus, 50 W for the filter, 10 W for the pruned AI, that’s 60 W. With 20 % reserve you get 72 W, leaving a 28 W cushion before hitting 100 W. The key will be to make the sensor interface as low‑power as possible, maybe using SPI with DMA so the CPU stays idle. Let’s draft a quick table: bus clock, bus power, processor, AI, sensors, margins. Then we can see where we can shave a few watts. I’ll pull up the latest specs on the ADC and put it in the spreadsheet.Got it, I’ll pull the latest ADC and sensor specs and line them up against the 100 W budget. Then we can spot any over‑provisioning and tighten it up. Let’s get that spreadsheet ready.