Post by Chris Coffey

For most of the Space Age, satellites were cameras. They collected observations and handed them to humans on the ground to interpret. Now the interpretation is moving into orbit. This essay examines the quiet revolution of onboard artificial intelligence, from cloud-detection experiments on tiny European satellites to datacenter-class GPUs and vision-language models operating hundreds of kilometers above Earth. The technology is remarkable. The implications are larger. Meaning itself is moving closer to the source of observation, and our institutions, standards, and tradecraft are racing to catch up.