Northrop Grumman inks deal with Luminary Cloud for accelerated, AI-enabled spacecraft design

Artificial intelligence startup Luminary Cloud has developed a physics-based AI model for Northrop Grumman that will allow the defense contractor to more quickly design and build new spacecraft.

Announced on Tuesday, the new partnership gives engineers access to a purpose-built tool known as Physics AI that can generate high-fidelity simulations of spacecraft subsystems in seconds. The model was built in collaboration between Luminary Cloud and Northrop Grumman experts, and is powered by NVIDIA’s PhysicsNeMo — an open-source framework for building and training physics-based AI models.

The model is currently tailored for designing spacecraft thruster nozzles and will allow users to see how different physical design elements of the subsystem will affect its performance, meaning Northrop Grumman can more accurately design new platforms based on specific program requirements.

“Physics AI is the next level of complexity in AI, and Northrop Grumman is bringing this technology to our design engineers to dramatically speed up hardware development,” Han Park, vice president of artificial intelligence integration at Northrop Grumman Space Systems, said in a statement. “Using AI to make something small, like a spacecraft thruster, puts us on a path to do much bigger things, like using AI to design larger components or even an entire spacecraft.”

While computational fluid dynamics simulations have been used to design new spacecraft and subsystems for years, it can take up to 12 hours for a platform to generate a single simulation. However, the new model is able to create a spacecraft simulation in just seconds, according to Juan Alonso, Luminary Cloud’s chief technology officer...

Read the entire article here: defensescoop.com/2025/10/28/northrop-grumman-luminary-cloud-physics-ai-space/