The opening of the third day in Washington featured the man who was SpaceX's first employee. Aerospace engineer Tom Mueller, who has since left Elon Musk's company, runs Impulse Space, a startup founded in 2021 and dedicated to developing technology and space transportation services for satellites.
Among the concepts he outlined for the future of the segment, he recalled that a "true" space economy is one that utilizes the resources of that environment. "There are opportunities on the Moon, and I'm excited to see what happens there. Space is today what the Internet was in the 1990s. We don't even know what it will be like," he confided.
What is certain is the importance of AI in this scenario. For Mueller, the main uses of AI will be AI-enabled robots and robotics in space. The latter "will open access to space. I prefer to think of an army of robots doing heavy tasks in that environment, rather than humans."