Advancing Intelligent Personal Assistants for Human Spaceflight

The Artemis program and upcoming missions to Mars mark a new era of human space exploration that will require new tools to support astronaut autonomy in the absence of real-time communication with Earth. This paper investigates the role of voice-based intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) in future crewed space missions. Through semi-structured interviews with astronauts (n=3) and spaceflight experts (n=12), we identify key user-centered design requirements for IPAs in this uniquely constrained and safety-critical environment. Our thematic analysis reveals core requirements for flexibility, reliability, offline capability, and multimodal interaction. Drawing on these findings, we outline design guidelines for…