Month: January 2024

Enlarge / Artist's concept of the Helios space tug. (credit: Impulse Space)

In recent years there have been a number of modest 'tugs' brought online to ferry small satellites to designated orbits. These miniature spacecraft provide so-called last-mile service and are particularly useful for satellites that launch as a part of rideshare missions and seek to reach a different altitude or inclination than that of the primary payload.

However these space logistics vehicles, offered by a variety of companies, such as D-Orbit, Momentus, Launcher, and several others, generally are designed for satellites with a mass of a few dozen to a few hundred kilograms.

What has been lacking so far is a larger in-space tug that can haul bigger satellites to more distant orbits. That's the market that a new spacecraft built by Impulse Space, Helios, intends to serve.

Enlarge (credit: BMW)

The wave of AI hysteria at the 2024 CES in Las Vegas was predictable in many ways. It is, after all, the single biggest tech trend of the moment, and what startup wouldn't want to be part of that buzzy zeitgeist?

To me, the widespread embrace by car manufacturers is a little more surprising. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen all had AI-related announcements at CES, unexpected because, though exciting, technologies like ChatGPT have proven unreliable when it comes to minor details like delivering useful, factual information.

For its implementation, BMW had a compelling solution to the problem: Take the power of a large language model, like Amazon's Alexa LLM, but only allow it to cite information from internal BMW documentation about the car.