Amazon to Send Alexa to Lunar Orbit

After working to put Alexa into everything from hospitals to cars to microwave ovens, Amazon is now readying a version of its voice-driven personal assistant for NASA’s Orion space capsule.

Wednesday, the Seattle tech giant announced an initiative with the aerospace firm Lockheed Martin that will send Alexa on this year’s uncrewed Artemis 1 test launch of Orion and its Space Launch System rocket. Alexa will make this journey to lunar orbit as part of a technology payload called Callisto that will test how software smarts might help future astronauts.

“The Star Trek computer was part of our original inspiration for Alexa, so it’s exciting and humbling to see our vision for ambient intelligence come to life on board Orion,” the announcement quotes Aaron Rubenson, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa Everywhere.

The announcement further notes that this use case imposes unusual design constraints: vibrations during launch, radiation exposure above low Earth orbit, and an acoustic environment inside the four-person Orion spacecraft featuring many metallic surfaces and background noises from pumps and other machinery. 

The Moon’s average distance of almost 239,000 miles from Earth will also impose non-trivial latency, so Orion’s version of Alexa will lean heavily on Amazon’s Local Voice Control on-device processing. What kind of questions might she answer for future astronauts? The release imagines Alexa tapping into spacecraft telemetry to report the status of Orion systems and retrieving news and sports updates from Earth that crew members can request.

Presumably, astronauts who elect to amuse themselves by saying “Alexa, open the pod bay door” will not get the current joke answer to that reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey: “I’m not HAL, and we’re not in space.”

Since Artemis 1 will not have people on board, Amazon plans to stage a “virtual crew experience” at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where invited guests can interact remotely with Alexa. Amazon also plans to offer Earthbound Alexa users experiences to update them on Artemis 1’s progress, with a preview available if you tell the assistant “Alexa, take me to the Moon.” 

The first crewed Artemis mission, a planned return of American astronauts to the moon that will send the first woman there, is now estimated to happen no earlier than 2025. But the history of cost and schedule overruns with the Space Launch System, a gigantic launch vehicle built around such Space Shuttle components as its main engines, gives reason to doubt that forecast.

It’s not clear if any version of Alexa will actually make that upcoming journey. But should that happen, NASA is at least positioned to avoid one common human-compatibility complaint: None of the space agency’s current and candidate astronauts are named Alexa.

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