Keeping crews healthy becomes more difficult as human-spaceflight mission lengthen and travel further from Earth.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are able to rely on real-time communications with Houston, regular medicine deliveries, and a quick return after six months. NASA and its commercial partners like Elon Musk’s SpaceX are looking to conduct longer-duration mission that would take humans on a journey to the moon or Mars.
This looming reality is forcing NASA to gradually make onboard medical care “Earth-independent.” An early experiment is an AI medical assistant proof-of concept the agency is developing with Google. The tool is called Crew Medical Assistant Digital Assistant (CMO – DA) and is designed to assist astronauts in diagnosing and treating symptoms when there is no doctor available or communication to Earth is blocked.
This multimodal tool includes speech, text and images. It runs within Google Cloud’s Vertex Artificial Intelligence environment.
According to David Cruley, customer engineering at Google’s Public Sector Business Unit, the project is operated under a Google Public Sector fixed-price subscription agreement that includes cloud services, application development infrastructure and model training. NASA owns the source codes for the app, and has assisted in fine-tuning the models. Google Vertex AI provides access to models created by Google and third parties.
Two organizations have put CMO DA through three scenarios – an ankle injury, ear pain, and flank pain. Three physicians, including an astronaut, evaluated the assistant on the basis of her performance in the areas of initial evaluation, history taking, clinical reasoning and treatment.
A trio of physicians, one being an astronaut, graded the assistant’s performance across the initial evaluation, history-taking, clinical reasoning, and treatment. They found that the flank pain assessment and treatment plan was 74% correct, while ear pain was 80% and the ankle injury 88%.October 27-29, 2025
The roadmap is deliberately incremental. NASA scientists said in In a slide show they said that they plan to add more data sources like medical devices and train the model to be’situationally aware’ — that is, attuned with space medicine-specific conditions such as microgravity. Cruley was vague on whether Google plans to seek regulatory clearance for this type of medical assistant to be used in doctor’s offices on Earth. However, it could be a logical next step if the model has been validated in orbit.
This tool could not only improve the health of astronauts on orbit, but the lessons learned could also be applied to other areas of healthcare,” he said.
Aria Alamalhodaei is a TechCrunch reporter who covers the space and defence industries. She previously covered public utilities and power grids for California Energy Markets. Her work can also be found in MIT’s Undark Magazine and Discover Magazine. She holds a MA in art history, which she earned at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Aria is based out of Austin, Texas.
You can contact or verify outreach from Aria by emailing aria.techcrunch@gmail.com or via encrypted message at +1 512-937-3988 on Signal.
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