NASA is working with Google to develop an artificial-intelligence medical assistant designed to support astronauts on long-duration missions where real-time communication with Earth may be impossible. The proof-of-concept system, called the Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), runs inside Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform and uses speech, text and image inputs to help diagnose and treat illnesses or injuries when no physician is on board. In early tests covering three simulated scenarios—ankle injury, flank pain and ear pain—the tool produced treatment plans that independent physicians judged to be 74% to 88% likely correct. NASA retains ownership of the source code, while Google is providing cloud services and model-training infrastructure under a fixed-price Public Sector Subscription agreement. The project is part of NASA’s push to make crew health care more “Earth-independent” ahead of planned Moon and Mars expeditions. Engineers aim to incorporate data from onboard medical devices and refine the model for space-specific conditions such as microgravity, with the longer-term possibility of adapting the technology for terrestrial health applications if on-orbit validation succeeds.