Today, Meta is partnering with Booz Allen to deploy a customized version of its open source Llama 3.2 model to the International Space Station (ISS). The goal of Space Llama is to test the performance of artificial intelligence in orbit to support scientific research.

Now that Llama's complete "model weights" are publicly available, researchers can install and run it on standalone hardware that doesn't require an Internet connection, an essential requirement aboard the International Space Station. This approach eliminates the need to route data through Earth servers, improving data security and reducing latency.

The Space Llama setting combines:

  • Booz Allen’s A2E2 (Artificial Intelligence for Edge Environments) Framework

  • HP Enterprise Space Computer-2

  • NVIDIA accelerated computing (CUDA, cuDNN, and cuBLAS)

  • Meta’s Llama visual AI feature

The team reports that by running a compact, energy-efficient system similar to those used by satellites, inference times for some tasks have been reduced from minutes to just over a second.

Additionally, Space Llama integrates generative and multimodal AI. It can generate text or images based on prompts and handle mixed data types: text, visual, and audio. A practical use case is that it enables researchers to directly access important technical references and instructions without the need for an internet connection.

This deployment follows Booz Allen’s deployment with HPE in August 2024space computerAfter demonstrating a generative large language model (LLM) on the International Space Station on the 2nd, Meta announced in November 2024 that its fine-tuned Llama model will be made available to the U.S. government and private partners.

Booz Allen Chief Technology Officer Bill Vass said of the project:

Historically, innovation in space has been limited by reliance on computing and communications capabilities on Earth. Space Llama brings tools directly to the edge of space to quickly perform critical repairs and maintain the International Space Station National Laboratory, propelling us toward a future of space science, exploration and operations at the furthest edge of mission – space.

Space LlamaThe experiments are expected to inform future missions, including lunar and Mars exploration, and could influence the deployment of autonomous systems in remote or disconnected environments on Earth.