Title: Glass Box at Orbit: A Constitutional AI Verification Framework for Trustworthy Autonomous CubeSat Intelligence

Abstract

The space sector is steadily advancing toward a reality that remains largely unaddressed: the operation of orbital data centers hosting thousands of autonomous AI workloads without human intervention, situated 550 kilometers above the Earth. Tech giants like Microsoft and AWS, alongside a burgeoning array of orbital computing startups, are actively transitioning cloud-scale processing capabilities from terrestrial environments to space. However, a critical governance gap persists: there is currently no established mechanism to halt erroneous decisions made by autonomous AI systems at the scale of orbital data centers before those actions become irreversible.

To address this challenge, we present "Glass Box," a runtime constitutional AI verification layer designed to intercept every potential action proposed by an onboard AI policy. This system evaluates each candidate against six physics-based constitutional constraints and seven Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) safety invariants prior to any command being executed on spacecraft subsystems. Each authorized action is assigned a weighted explainability score, $E(a_t)$, ranging from 0 to 1, and is accompanied by a comprehensive constitutional audit log.

We validate the efficacy of Glass Box within the context of Project October, a fully simulated five-layer autonomous orbital intelligence architecture tailored for CubeSat-class vehicles. Our analysis demonstrates that the computational overhead of Glass Box verification scales as $O(N_c)$ with respect to the number of constitutional rules, remaining independent of both the model size and the dimensionality of the spacecraft’s state. The study includes a complete formal specification of the constitutional constraint grammar, details on the seven LTL safety invariants verified through Z3 and NuSMV model checking, and a practical example illustrating how Glass Box blocks an unsafe inference request during eclipse entry under conditions of degraded battery power. As orbital computing infrastructure expands to resemble data centers, runtime constitutional verification transitions from a theoretical novelty to essential mission-critical safety infrastructure, a requirement that every autonomous orbital platform will inevitably need to adopt.

Source: arXiv Generated at: 2026-06-03 00:00:00 UTC