The space industry is quietly building toward something nobody has fully reckoned with: orbital data centers running thousands of autonomous AI workloads with no human in the loop, 550 km above the Earth. Microsoft, AWS, and a growing list of orbital computing ventures are moving cloud-scale processing off the ground and into orbit. What none of them have answered yet is the governance question -- when autonomous AI systems at orbital data center scale make wrong decisions in space, what stops those decisions before they become irreversible? We introduce Glass Box: a runtime constitutional AI verification layer that intercepts every candidate action from an onboard AI policy and evaluates it against six physics-grounded constitutional constraints and seven Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) safety invariants before a single command reaches any spacecraft subsystem. Every approved action carries a weighted explainability score E(a_t) in [0,1] and a complete constitutional audit log. We demonstrate Glass Box within Project October: a fully simulated five-layer autonomous orbital intelligence architecture for CubeSat-class spacecraft. We prove that Glass Box verification overhead is O(N_c) in the number of constitutional rules, independent of model size or spacecraft state dimension. We present a complete formal specification of the constitutional constraint grammar, seven LTL safety invariants verified by Z3 and NuSMV model checking, and a detailed worked example of Glass Box intercepting an unsafe inference request at eclipse-entry under degraded battery state. As orbital computing scales toward data center infrastructure, runtime constitutional verification is no longer a research novelty -- it is mission-critical safety infrastructure that every autonomous orbital platform will eventually require.

翻译：航天工业正在悄然构建一个人类尚未完全认知的架构：在距地球550公里轨道上运行的无人值守数据中心集群，承载着数千个自主AI工作负载。微软、亚马逊云服务及日益增多的轨道计算企业，正将云端处理能力从地面迁移至太空。然而，这些参与者均未解答治理难题——当轨道数据中心规模的自主AI系统在太空中做出错误决策时，如何在不可逆后果发生前予以阻断？我们提出"黑盒"系统：一种运行时宪法式AI验证层，在每项候选操作指令抵达航天器任何子系统前，拦截来自机载AI策略的候选动作，并针对六项基于物理的宪法约束条件与七项线性时序逻辑安全不变式进行验证。每个被批准的动作均携带权重化可解释性评分E(a_t) ∈ [0,1] 及完整的宪法审计日志。我们在"十月计划"项目框架内演示了该验证系统——一个针对立方星级航天器的完全仿真五层自主轨道智能架构。我们证明，"黑盒"验证的计算复杂度为O(N_c)（N_c为宪法规则数量），与模型规模或航天器状态维度无关。本文给出宪法约束语法的完整形式化规范、经Z3与NuSMV模型检验的七项线性时序逻辑安全不变式，以及"黑盒"系统在电池退化状态下拦截日食进入阶段不安全推理请求的详细工作实例。随着轨道计算向数据中心基础设施规模发展，运行时宪法式验证已不再是研究新概念，而是所有自主轨道平台最终必备的关键安全基础设施。