For a long time, SpaceX has been synonymous with the development of newer, larger, and ever-more-reusable rockets. But that began to change over the last decade with the introduction of Starlink, and the change has accelerated during the last 18 months as the company has pivoted to data and artificial intelligence.
At last week’s UP.Summit conference in Florida, the vice president of launch at SpaceX, Kiko Dontchev, offered some of the most revealing comments to date about the company’s changing focus, how it is embracing AI, and why the Falcon 9 rocket—which has dominated global launch for a decade and remains the world’s preeminent launch vehicle—is firmly on the road to retirement.
“In the last couple years, when I talk about SpaceX, yes, we are a rocket company, but fundamentally we are an infrastructure company at this point,” Dontchev said. “We’re building infrastructure on the ground and low Earth orbit, soon on the Moon, and obviously eventually Mars.”
Earlier this year, SpaceX acquired one of founder Elon Musk’s other companies, xAI. SpaceX engineers were already using xAI’s tools, Dontchev said, but in recent months, employees have really started to figure out how artificial intelligence can speed up their work.
“What’s happened at SpaceX is we’ve really gone through a huge acceleration of adoption,” Dontchev said. “Even just a year ago, we weren’t adopting it that quickly, but really starting this year, we started to adopt it extremely rapidly. And the acceleration we have seen in our ability to do engineering is unlike anything I’ve ever seen at the company in my 16 years.”
Tasks that would take SpaceX employees hours to days now take seconds to minutes, he said. And it’s not just the engineers. Dontchev said the work of identifying foreign object debris, or FOD, in aerospace parts has been largely automated using the AI assistant Grok. This debris can cause catastrophic damage to engines and other spacecraft components.
