Experts say artificial intelligence -- which has wide applications across the military, civil and private sectors -- will be critical to furthering space technology as the cosmos becomes more contested. "The space environment continues to rapidly evolve," said Melanie Stricklan, CEO of Slingshot Aerospace, a space simulation and analytics company based in Austin, Texas, and El Segundo, California. "We continue to proliferate with new users and capabilities, new sensors both on orbit looking down, and on the Earth looking back up at space." Artificial intelligence can improve space domain awareness, accelerate command-and-control decisions as well as inject resiliency into satellites and their corresponding networks, she said during an online panel discussion hosted by Booz Allen Hamilton. "There's a lot of limitations for space today, but I think AI solutions really offer a transformative opportunity for ... the protect-and-defend mission on the defense side [and] for improving operations on the commercial side," Stricklan said.

One of the next big things in geospatial intelligence is tiny black boxes aboard satellites that ingest massive amounts of data in space and instantly analyze it. Geospatial data manipulation and analysis in real time is the holy grail in the military intelligence business. "We are trying to help commanders'see through the fog of data' in situations when they have to make decisions very quickly," said Melanie Stricklan, chief technology officer and co-founder of Slingshot Aerospace, in Manhattan Beach, California. Stricklan served 21 years in the U.S. Air Force, and her duties included flying in the back of the JSTARS radar surveillance plane. The airplane's sensors were pulling loads of data but it was hard to extract intelligence, she told SpaceNews.