Post-Launch Capability Expansion of Vision-Language Models via Prompting for On-Orbit Spacecraft Inspection (opens in new tab)

Spaceborne inspection systems often deploy perception models prior to launch, after which updating model weights or expanding fixed label sets becomes operationally impractical. While supervised models can be integrated pre-flight, adding new semantic capabilities in orbit requires retraining and re-uploading parameters. We investigate whether prompt-driven vision--language models can enable post-launch semantic expansion, allowing new spacecraf...