Amazon Joins Lockheed Martin and Cisco to Send Alexa to Space, Offers NASA Tours for SchoolKids

'Alexa, when are we arriving at the moon?' quips GeekWire.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:

This week brought news that Amazon is teaming up with Lockheed Martin and Cisco to put its Alexa voice assistant on NASA's Orion spacecraft for the (uncrewed) Artemis 1 round-the-moon mission....

On the heels of that announcement came news that Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) has partnered with Mobile CSP and the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) on the Alexa for Astronauts program, which will provide students in grades 4-and-up with live WebEx by Cisco tours from NASA's Johnson Space Center. This program will also provide curriculum — NSTA's Using AI to Monitor Health and Mobile CSP's Alexa in Space — aimed at teaching high school Science and AP Computer Science Principles students 'how to program their own Alexa skills that could help astronauts [and 'inexperienced space travelers, such as tourists'] solve problems in space and communities at home' using MIT's App Inventor.

App Inventor, some may recall, was developed at Google to bring programming to the masses only to be suddenly abandoned. App Inventor was later picked up by MIT and — with support from Google and millions in NSF funding — eventually found its way into curriculum developed for the new AP CSP course aimed at mainstreaming AP Computer Science.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.