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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
More than 60 years ago, the Soviet Union successfully launched the first man into space.
Today, the number of people who've been to space is in the hundreds.
Still, that's a far cry from widespread space travel.
I have been obsessed with the science fiction idea of humans living in space for a long time.
Ariel Ekblot got her PhD in aerospace structure and design, a crucial step towards her dream of shifting space life from sci-fi to reality.
Nowadays, I go by space architect, thinking about the future of infrastructure in orbit.
Step two Ariel founded the company Aurelia with two other women, Danielle DeLotte and Sana Sharma, to get more people to space, more often and for longer periods of time.
She says the challenge now is building in space.
The bottleneck isn't rockets anymore, it's real estate.
It's trying to get bigger volumes of space stations in orbit.
Her solution?
The equivalent of magnetic Legos in space, called tesserae structures, that would self-assemble into large livable structures in orbit —.
And Ariel says the reason she's so excited for more humans to live in space isn't to escape the Earth.
I love Earth.
Earth is the best home we'll ever have.
One of the things we're most excited for in the space context is can we off-world heavy industry?
Don't off-world the humans.
Let them have a beautiful existence on Earth.
But off-world the heavy industry and slowly let Earth recover as a garden planet.
Today on the show, constructing buildings in space to build a better Earth.
From creating microgravity laboratories and harnessing unfiltered solar power to fabricating large human dwellings in space.
We get into why yesterday's sci-fi could be tomorrow's reality.
I'm Regina Barber and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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So Ariel, during your PhD, you designed a tesserae, which is a self-assembling building unit you created for living in space.
How does this work?
So if you think about how space structures have been built in the last 20, 30 years, it's typically aluminum that gets pre-built and welded on the ground.
And then it has to be squeezed into a rocket.
It has to fit inside.
What we developed at MIT that we call Tesserae are basically like space Legos that have powerful magnets on their edges.
When those Legos, these modular pieces, are released in space, they float together.
That's because they're in microgravity.
They're basically in free fall around a planet.
We have videos from inside the International Space Station.
We've tested the prototypes twice now.
We're about to go back to the ISS in early 2026.
Like smaller versions of them.
Exactly.
Prototypes that help us test the algorithm of self-assembly, test the energy required to pulse through the magnets because in addition to coming together, it's a self-correcting system.
So the tiles have essentially, like AI, built into the pieces themselves, into the hardware, and they can decide if they bonded correctly or not.
And we were really inspired by biomimetic systems, like how proteins and DNA self-assembles in the body and can correct itself.
Oh, wow.
This name actually comes from like an art process, right?
Where like it's mosaics, I think, in Roman times.
Is that where this name came from or is it an acronym?
It's both.
So I went on this amazing trip and we had an incredible opportunity to help restore ancient Roman mosaics.
And we learned about tesserae, these tiny little tiles that make up the bigger mosaic.
And I came home incredibly inspired to make my work fit in that word.
Yes.
It's a terribly tortured acronym.
Never going to do this again.
No, this is what you do when you're in science.
Exactly.
You got to lean into the nerd dub.
So it stands for tessellated electromagnetic space structures for the exploration of reconfigurable adaptive environments.
Wow.
Tell me that's too much.
I know it is.
You got it.
You got it.
No.
So what are the hurdles that still exist to like getting this up and running in space?
Yeah.
So when you have a modular system like this, you have a lot of seals that have to really work well to be able to, for example, use it as a habitat to keep air pressure inside.
So we're designing a system of gasketing or clamps that would actually bring the structure in together and hold air pressure together.
And then the second of many things we think about is how do we protect the human crew that's inside this big buckyball?
So we're also thinking about the shielding that's required to provide good radiation protection.
Your company has also talked about how space structures can be used for things like agriculture or manufacturing.
How would that work?
Yeah.
So one of the interesting things about deep space exploration is we're going to have to be able to grow our own agriculture.
We have to be able to be self-sustaining in a future space station.
And this actually does still come back down and benefit life on Earth, in that example of our kind of mission-driven work that's focused on Earth first.
In areas that are torn by natural disasters or really resource-constrained environments.
There's a lot that we can learn from space agriculture and then be able to take some of those lessons down to Earth.
We just did a big space garden project with Daikin, one of the world's largest HVAC companies.
Thinking about, how do you?
–.
Keep air humidified.
How do you keep it at the right temperature in an extreme environment?
How do you get CO2 out of the air and turn it into oxygen for humans, or the opposite for plants?
Right,
Plants need CO2.
So we're working with some exceptional partners to put together this notion of a space garden?
How would we actually do plant growth in orbit?
And then brought this to the Venice Architecture Biennale earlier this year.
That is amazing.
So this kind of work would, I assume, require workers.
Like, do you envision people farming and doing shift work in orbit?
Yes, I think there's a mix.
It's going to be humans and robots working together.
So we call this human-robotic interaction or the symbiosis between humans and robots.
In the future.
We're already thinking about things like AI data centers in space, partly to get the carbon footprint of those installations off of Earth, but also to get really abundant green energy there to those installations.
And so a company that we spun out of our work at Aurelia called Rendezvous Robotics is taking the test array work forward to be able to do things at that scale without humans involved.
But on the habitation side, yes, I think we will have humans.
I think we're a critical part of exploration what it means to find new knowledge for the sake of new knowledge and explore this frontier.
So I think it'll continue to be a mix of humans and robots.
So would the workers live their lives up there eating, sleeping and working, or would they be commuting?
I anticipate that the workers are less likely than people think from science fiction to actually live in space.
Steady state.
It turns out it's quite hard to live in microgravity.
Your bones get weaker, your heart gets weaker, your shape of your eyeball changes.
And so what really I think makes more sense is that we think of these installations in low Earth orbit, For example, close to Earth or between Earth and the moon, as places where you commute to do your work, to do the really special thing that calls you to orbit.
But when you're done with that if it's two weeks or three months or six months then you come back down to Earth and you still live your life on Earth.
There is, of course, a farther out future where we've actually figured out artificial gravity, which is when you spin a habitat gingerly so you don't make people sick, but you spin it a big enough one at a slow enough rate that you can actually get close to Earth's gravity, and then it's healthier for people to live in orbit for long durations.
But in the near term, I think it'll be more like commuting to space than living in space.
So when I think about commuting, commuting now is like not the best for the environment.
So what about commuting to space?
Is that going to affect our environment as well?
This is a really important question for the space industry because at this particular moment there's not a significant difference footprint from the space industry compared to say, commercial aviation.
But if we succeed in all of these launches, we very well may scale up to the point where it's significant.
So there's already some great research into cleaner types of rocket fuel to make sure that the prevalence of launches, if we get a higher frequency of launch cadence off of Earth, that it doesn't contribute to a really serious additional carbon footprint.
So if there are a lot of launches like people are commuting up into space, how are we going to deal with space junk and debris?
Space debris is one of these really important problems that we're facing in the space industry.
It's an early tragedy of the commons from all the prior launches that have gone up.
There's a couple of different ways to deal with it.
One, we have to stem the tide.
So we have to have really responsible actors who are no longer contributing to additional debris.
The FAA made a ruling that any new objects that are launched to space have to have a provable deep orbit plan.
You have to convince the FAA that your object is going to burn up completely on reentry and be incinerated, so it's not going to contribute to space debris.
The other project is to remediate.
And so go and actually clean up the existing debris.
And there's some really cool ideas.
Think Pac-Man in space, basically going through with a net or a big magnet with some ability to collect over time Enough debris that you have enough mass that you begin to feel the effect of drag in the atmosphere and you'd be pulled in and be able to burn up on reentry.
Space is very vast.
So even the debris amount that we have now is not hindering us from doing space launches, but we absolutely need to clean it up.
Speaking of environmental issues and space and junk and pollution.
You're exploring building solar panels in space, in low Earth orbit, like basically where the International Space Station is.
How would that work?
So this is where Rendezvous Robotics comes in again.
This is our startup that's focused on how do you self-assemble things that aren't habitat related, that are big flat, massive and would have a really important near-term function, like being a solar panel or being a radiator.
It would be way too slow and dangerous to ask a human to go out in an EVA suit, which is what we call an extravehicular activity suit, and go do that by hand, which is how a lot of the International Space Station was built, which is wild.
And we also don't want to rely on a robotic arm.
Too slow, too much risk that it would bump or with too much momentum.
Yeah, it's too fragile.
Yeah, exactly.
It's too fragile.
So we really need all these pieces to be able to come together, not all at one time, but gradually, attaching to each other, build out a big field.
You know the size of maybe several football fields worth of solar panels.
We're super excited to be working with companies that are thinking about the future of space-based solar power, thinking about how do you capture raw, unfiltered sunlight above the clouds way more efficient, concentrate it and beam it down to Earth.
You could have New York City powered at night by a beam from space.
Now that you say it's a beam, I'm less scared.
Because when I saw that in like making areas of Earth have light when it is nighttime can be dangerous, right.
Like, you could alter seasons.
You could mess up ecosystems.
You could mess up circadian rhythm.
But you're talking about an actual beam, which sounds kind of super villainy, too.
Yes.
How are you thinking about some of these issues that might be a problem?
Yes.
This company, Overview Energy, has basically figured out a way to do it very safely.
So like you said, it's a concentrated beam, so it's not going to light up the city.
It's not going to affect animals.
It's not going to affect kids, homes.
Seasons.
Yeah, not going to affect seasons.
It's essentially something that you would beam down onto maybe even existing solar panels.
And then they also control the energy of it so that a plane can fly through it.
So it doesn't overload it, too.
Yeah, exactly.
So it doesn't overload it.
It is not a concentrated thing that could cause any damage.
So it doesn't basically require an air traffic control keep-out zone, for example.
And this is an incredible innovation that we've known how to do in some ways since the 1970s, but it wasn't cheap enough until recently, when the costs to get to space have dropped so dramatically, to begin to make this a reality.
So how feasible is this, like if you were going to give me a timeline?
I think inside five years, they're going to have power beaming demos from orbit.
They just did an airplane-based power beaming demo, so they showed that it could do it, as they're moving in a plane.
So I think within five years, they'll have power beaming from space, certainly.
And at 10-year mark, you're thinking about power utilities from space, fundamental green energy and much more abundant energy.
That's a much more profoundly clean way to deliver energy to the global south as they start to industrialize even further, rather than needing to rely on fossil fuels or some of the ways in which other nations came up through industrial energy use.
So I think there's a really interesting twin opportunity between Earth and space there to act as ethical space-faring and Earth-based citizens.
Ariel, thank you so much for talking with us today about building in space.
Thank you so much for having me.
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This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy, edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones.
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