Compute Above the Clouds: Laser Comms and 5G NTN for AI-Driven Constellations
Kerri Cahoy Sheila Evans Widnall (1960) Professor, MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Emerging space networks—from Starlink to Kuiper—are paving the way toward a programmable fabric in low Earth orbit. This talk explores how dynamic tasking and onboard AI/edge compute let satellites determine how to efficiently use their resources for sensing and decide whether what they have sensed is useful and when to deliver it, all while laser communications provide low-latency crosslinks and supplement high-rate downlinks. We talk about recent progress in onboard autonomy and outline future architectures that fuse 5G NTN standards with optical crosslinks for resilient space-to-space and space-to-ground connectivity, enabling real-time tipping/cueing, federated learning across constellations, and “mission apps” deployed on-orbit. Work is underway with lab demos and simulations building toward field flight demos of capable pointing, acquisition, and tracking, resource scheduling, and interoperability that can scale to constellations. The result is a blueprint toward autonomous, service-oriented space networks that envision satellites as cooperative, updatable nodes in a global communications and sensing cloud.