{"id":244961,"date":"2026-10-06T05:05:25","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T10:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/engineers-teach-spacecraft-to-dream-their-way-to-the-space-station"},"modified":"2026-10-06T05:05:25","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T10:05:25","slug":"engineers-teach-spacecraft-to-dream-their-way-to-the-space-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/engineers-teach-spacecraft-to-dream-their-way-to-the-space-station","title":{"rendered":"Engineers teach spacecraft to \u2018dream\u2019 their way to the space station"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/engineers-teach-spacecraft-to-dream-their-way-to-the-space-station2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Docking with the ISS may seem simple. However, actually doing so shows how difficult orbital mechanics can be. It\u2019s like traveling down a highway at 28,000 km\/hr (17,000 mph) and parallel parking in an open garage on a multibillion-dollar laboratory traveling at the same speed. If you try to accelerate forward, you actually drift up, and there\u2019s no air friction to naturally slow you down. Oh, and if you hit the lab, everyone aboard both your craft and the station dies, and the resulting debris field could wipe out dozens of satellites and even harm people on the ground. No pressure, obviously.<\/p>\n<p>For decades, aerospace engineers have docked successfully using hard-coded physics equations and human pilots to make corrections. But now, a new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server from researchers at Stanford is taking a shot at building an AI to perform a series of \u201cmental simulations\u201d that could fundamentally change how future spacecraft interact with each other.<\/p>\n<p>Their solution is called the Out-of-this-World-Model (OWM), but before we get to what that is, it\u2019s best to recap how we typically navigate in low Earth orbit (LEO). Traditionally, navigation computers use a type of algorithm called a guidance, navigation and control (GNC) algorithm. They also take advantage of another mathematical tool called an extended Kalman filter, which helps them take in data from GPS receivers and star trackers and output thruster burn duty cycles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Docking with the ISS may seem simple. However, actually doing so shows how difficult orbital mechanics can be. It\u2019s like traveling down a highway at 28,000 km\/hr (17,000 mph) and parallel parking in an open garage on a multibillion-dollar laboratory traveling at the same speed. If you try to accelerate forward, you actually drift up, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,2229,219,6,2028],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-information-science","category-mathematics","category-physics","category-robotics-ai","category-satellites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}