Across the silence of interplanetary distances and the crowded corridors of low Earth orbit, artificial intelligence has quietly taken up residence in spacecraft—not as a reasoning mind, but as a precise instrument shaped by constraint. The physics of space travel, not the ambitions of machine cognition, have driven this development: light-speed delays, scarce bandwidth, and fleets too vast for human oversight have each demanded a narrow, purpose-built solution. What is flying today is less a revolution in intelligence than a series of elegant answers to very specific engineering problems, eac