ORLANDO, Fla. — The emergence of China’s DeepSeek has shaken up the artificial intelligence sector, promising new opportunities for space companies beginning to explore ways to leverage AI in space. AI is seen as key to unlocking true autonomy in orbit and managing an increasingly congested space domain. Yet, while satellite operators like Loft Orbital are making strides to integrate AI into their operations, widespread adoption across the industry remains in its early stages. Enter DeepSeek, which claims to achieve high performance with significantly lower computational demands than other generative AI — a category of deep-learning models that analyze vast...