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A new era of space exploration is dawning with the 21st century but restricted budgets mean that new technologies must be found to manage risks in different ways. Systems of the future must be able to perform missions without ground support and handle contingencies, while being highly distributed and autonomous. Among the novel technologies of the new millenium will be the development of complete systems on a single chip and intelligent spacecraft.

Artificial intelligence (AI) practitioners are now gaining significant opportunities to make a valuable contribution to NASA's space program. In particular, AI is being integrated into work aiming to design, develop, deploy and evaluate autonomy capabilities for space platforms. AI has the potential to cut costs across the entire NASA mission lifecycle. This is particularly the case with model-based techniques. However, the higher strategic value of spacecraft autonomy may lie in other areas.