#137 | Self-Assembling Space Habitats | Ariel Ekblaw, Aurelia Institute & Foundry

5, 4, 3, 21 0. All engine running. Liftoff. We have a liftoff. Ariel Agblaw is an MIT Aero Astro engineer who founded the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration initiative and developed a new technique to build large scale space structures. She now runs the Aurelia Institute, a non for profit dedicated to building humanity's future in space, and the Aurelia Foundry, a space focused VC fund. We talk about all of these things in this episode. Enjoy. My name is Raphael Rutkin. I'm the founding partner of e2mc Earth2Mars Capital, a venture capital investor in dozens of space startups worldwide. Among other roles I have such as being a part time podcast host. Just as a reminder, this podcast is for informational purposes only and it does not reflect any view by E2MC and nothing should be taken as investment advice. Before we start, a quick favor. If you do enjoy this podcast, please leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast app such as Apple or Spotify. It does help other people find a podcast. Now on to today's episode. Hey space enthusiasts. Welcome back to another episode of the Space Business Podcast. I'm very excited today to have Ariel Ekblaw as my guest today. Trying to do this for a while, Ariel. And finally here we are. So welcome.

It's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

You know, and I was just about to introduce you with a specific role and then I just realized that just like me, you actually have several roles in the space sector. So I'll just let you introduce yourself.

Sure, sure. So I started out with a PhD from MIT and then I ran a lab for a little while. So I was director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative. I now take care of that as kind of an emeritus role and I have since spun out and I CEO of Aurelia Institute, which is a nonprofit research institute focused on the future of building space architecture, really trying to democratize access to space, and then recently really excited to be working with E2MC in partnership but also running my own space fund called Aurelia Foundry Fund. So I'm GP for the fund.

Okay. Yes. And for full disclosure, I think most of my listeners know, of course E2MC is space focused fund that I'm the founding partner of and we actually share some investments already, like exciting companies like Lambda Division doing replacement retinas in microgravity and also Max Space doing inflatable space habitats and hopefully many more in the future. Ariel. But let's take a step back. So you've done a few space things as you just laid out what originally got you excited about space.

My parents are both pilots, so my dad was an A10 fighter pilot in the US Air Force. My mom was a pilot, one of the first female pilots to ever fly for the U.S. air Force. They have a very Top Gun style American story. And I grew up with this intense love of serving my country and exploration and space and aviation. And although my parents didn't go on to be astronauts, they certainly loved science fiction. And so my childhood was really steeped in reading a lot of space science fiction. I just absolutely fell in love with it.

Did your parents actually ever try applying for astronaut program? Do you have like rejection letters somewhere hanging in the house?

Not that I know of. They really loved their flying career. They love Earth, you know, they really love their terrestrial aviation career. But they did set me up with this mentality that I could go out and explore further. And then in undergrad I had my first taste of microgravity. I got a chance with NASA to do the reduced gravity student flight opportunities program. Mouthful for basically a zero gravity flight as an undergrad. And then after that I was hooked and I knew I wanted to work in the space industry.

Okay, so being a pilot wasn't enough for you. You had to really set your eyes.

Yeah. How was meet your parents? Right? You gotta go, gotta do your parents.

Yeah, totally get that. And so kind of you've mentioned your career at mit, so if we skip forward to Aurelia. And by the way, where does the name Aurelia come from?

Ah, so Aurelia is an old English word for chrysalis, the item that a cocoon or a butterfly comes out of. And the idea is that we, humanity as a species are at the cusp of our next metamorphosis into a space faring species. And Aurelia Institute is just trying to lead the work at the cusp of this moment for humanity becoming an interplanetary civilization.

So interesting. So you were there at mit, you were at Media Lab and everything. So clearly very good academic career already. You could have probably done many things in space, right? You could have worked for like a traditional aerospace major or like exciting space startup company. What's the origin story or the genesis of Aurelia? How did that idea come up in your mind?

So during my PhD at MIT, I was working on this research that became my PhD around self assembling space architecture. How do we build infrastructure in orbit that's far, far bigger than our biggest rocket payload fairings, Essentially trying to make a science fiction reality or Science fiction vision become real, which is these large scale space structures. And I realized towards the end of my PhD it would be hard to do in academia, even harder to do it in a corporate company where there's somebody else's goals that are admirable, but you're working towards somebody else's ideas. I realized I really needed to spin out my own startup, and at this point a nonprofit, to explore the research and the years of R and D development behind things like autonomous self assembling space habitats, which is what we're focused on at Aaliyah. That's the tesserae system that really spun out of my PhD. So that's what led me to that particular path, was to have the intellectual freedom and the creative freedom, the startup freedom to build your own idea and really get it launched out of space.

So now I have to take a step back and so self assembling space structures. I'm sure most of the listeners are now wondering, what does that mean? How does that work? So keeping in mind we're a non technical podcast, if you can kind of give us the CliffsNote summary of what that actually looks like.

Absolutely. So imagine space, Legos space. So individual little interchangeable tiles that are tossed up into space when they're in microgravity, the tiles have powerful magnets on their edges. And when they're in microgravity, those magnets cause the tiles to dock, to come together and snap and click into place. And the first system that I ever worked on were these miniature tiles, hexagons and pentagons that would form a buckyball. So a buckyball is basically a glorified soccer ball if you picture that white and black tiling of a soccer ball. And the reason that we picked that shape for self assembling space structures is it's really close to a sphere. And in space you want to maximize the interior volume that you have for a given surface area. The surface area is the expensive part that you have to launch that mass up to orbit. So a sphere is a really efficient shape for being able to inhabit and that's why we picked it for future space habitats. There's a lot of technical work to do to make sure that we can pressurize the habitat correctly, latch all of those seams from all the edges of the tiles after the magnets bring them together. But that's the core concept between or behind autonomous self assembly is these electropermanent magnets that create the docking mechanism.

Very, very interesting. By the way, I love that you started with a Comparison to lego. You should actually try to get like LEGO to like sponsor part of this initiative. I mean that'd be. So we love space, right? I got a Saturn 5 Lego set at home.

We've been trying to, we've been thinking that maybe we should reach out to them to propose a tesserae LEGO set.

You're totally sure? And then you can kind of like color them in like different bright colors and space like, like Legos and put some, you know, paintings on and make them look like Legos. But, but, but anyway, so the, the original reason. So this was your PhD thesis, so what's the reason that you, what was the reason that you chose that as a PhD topic? Was it that desire that you wanted to build large scale structures in space? Was that it?

Yes. So I had been, you know, reading Ringworld about these huge ring the Earth or thinking about the Foundation Trilogy and these like really grand structures that were built on Trantor. And how do you actually achieve that? You need to be able to have in space construction that will scale. So it needs to be not as slow and as costly as astronauts wearing extra vehicular activity suits going out to manually construct things. Which is a lot of how the building of the International Space Station happened. I realized we needed a pathway to, in space manufacturing and in space construction that would actually scale, that you could build large infrastructure faster and ideally autonomously, robotically, without humans or even slow robotic arms required. So the idea behind self assembly really came inspired by nature. In nature, proteins self assemble in a decentralized fashion. There's no one central agent telling protein A, you know, go bond with protein B or attach. There's a certain intelligence embedded in the swarm like system. That's what we wanted to achieve with, with self assembling space structures is this native intelligence in the parts in the legos themselves that help the entire structure come together into something really large. And of course now we're working iterative engineering to go from small scale prototypes that we've tested on the International Space Station twice now to the human scale really large tiles that would be big enough to house a habitat.

And I guess what you could construct is size is constantly going up, right? As we having new super heavy rockets launching like this morning.

Yes, yes, like new Glenn. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And so, and so I guess that means for somebody like you, the International Space Station is just crammed ridiculously small space and you just need something much bigger.

I mean it's an amazing feat of engineering, it's an incredible international collaboration. But if you look at it. Not everyone wants to live in a science lab. And we absolutely do need to scale up the volume that we have in orbit. So we joke sometimes that we are a space real estate company. We're basically trying to build larger shells that can house humans, could house a biotech factory, could eventually help with entertainment in orbit, all of these different applications.

Yeah, what I was going to ask about that, what is your vision for like sort of some exciting applications of that additional real estate in space? Yeah.

So we have two main areas that we're really passionate about right now and we're thinking about this in terms of space infrastructure for the public good. So what large scale space structures can we put into low earth orbit and serve earth based citizens? Which is also from an economic standpoint as a VC where most of the market is and it's also from a standpoint of the nonprofit where most of the public good is that we could do. So the two applications right now that we're focused on are biotech. Can we build a self assembling large volume that could be a mass manufacturing facility for some of these really fantastic technologies that are coming online like Lambda Visions artificial Retina like protein folding or protein Kistral growth or Prometheus work in organoids? You know, can we scale up just the amount of room that we have in microgravity to produce and manufacture these really critical biotech products that come back down and be part of key therapeutics or cancer testing or Alzheimer's drug testing on Earth. The other application, that first application is basically building a habitat that humans and robots would work in together for biotech. The other application that we're thinking about right now is space based solar power. Can we use the TESS array self assembling technology where we self assemble these hexagons to support many of the amazing companies and research endeavors that are already out there trying to achieve space based solar power. And I can explain that as well for the podcast if your listeners haven't heard before. But it's a really amazing way to get profoundly more efficient, abundant clean energy to the surface of Earth.

Yes. By harnessing the sun's power output right there in space with very large structures. And I gotta ask because I'm such a sci fi freak, but I guess you eventually could scale it up all the way to a Dyson sphere.

Yeah, exactly. I mean we have, we joke that at AURELIA we have 50 year plans, 100 year plans, a thousand year plans, because we really want to contribute to humanity's horizons, to our long Term future. And in that thousand year plus plan is the Dyson Sphere.

Okay, I now understand why you need an institute rather than a 10 year lifetime VC fund to think about these things. Yes, but sorry, I'm breaking my own rule that we're non technical podcasts, so. And please Ariel, correct me if I'm saying something stupid, but a Dyson Sphere is basically the concept of enclosing or partially enclosing a star and capturing the energy output. So what we think an advanced civilization may opt to do because it is the most efficient way of capturing energy in a given solar system. Okay, so you're talking about two examples, bioproduction and space based solar power. You mentioned entertainment before as well, which I think is very interesting. Just living space I guess. Now one thing I do want to ask about you, you were mentioning before Earth orbit and of course that's kind of where most of the action is right now. But you know, I gotta ask, I mean, what about other locations in space? Like, what about, I don't know, like lunar orbit, Lagrange points, Martian orbit. I mean, you tell me what other locations in space you might eventually find interesting for using these structures other than the Dyson Sphere, which we already discussed.

Yeah, absolutely. So the beauty of self assembly is that it works really well in microgravity, which means it works really well in any orbit around a celestial body. So we're also thinking about this as a self assembling habitat that maybe could support lunar gateway. You know, NASA's plan for a semi commercial lunar station around the moon, we could absolutely deploy self assembling structures there. Same for Mars. Once we actually think that we are ready for a human crewed Mars mission, something like a Tessera habitat, could be a forward deployed mission base in orbit. And then the benefit is because it's self assemblable, it's also self disassembleable. Which means that if you have another volume where you can put the crew, as long as you can put the crew somewhere safe, you can depressurize the tesserae ball, pack those tiles flat, put them in an EDL craft, EDL is entry, descent and landing and send it back down to the surface of Mars. And then maybe use those tiles to reinforce surface habitation because there's a gravity environment, they're not going to pop up and self assemble as beautifully as they do when they're floating. But you could have a ladder and a pulley, or you could have a robotic arm that helps reuse the tiles basically and construct something on the surface. So we're even thinking now about this hybrid approach for both microgravity and surface of celestial body habitats.

It almost sounds like sophisticated camping.

Yes, exactly.

Intense self assembling, which is like much better. And so I should have asked you before, you mentioned a few times there the name of this technology. I think it's tesseray. Does that name mean anything?

Tessera is a tortured acronym. I learned my lesson in grad school. I'll never do this again. But TESS Ray stands for Tessellated Electromagnetic Space Structures for the Exploration of Reconfigurable Adaptive Environments. Basically I had gone on a trip to Italy in grad school and had had a chance to clean Roman mosaics, these really beautiful ancient Roman mosaics. And we were taught that the little glass pieces in Roman mosaics were called tesserae. And it seemed like such a perfect idea. And I was in the back of my mind that summer workshopping this idea about self assembly in space. I came back home, I said, okay, it has to be called tesserae. How do I force my research into that word? And that is where the tesserae acronym came from. Inspired by ancient Roman.

I'm not even going to ask how long it may have taken to come up with that acronym. That's very impressive. You deserve a NASA grant. Just NASA must love this. You deserve a NASA grant just for that.

This was pre chatgpt, so I really had to do that acronym on my own.

Very well done. Looking a little bit into the future. It doesn't have to be a thousand years. So beyond the sort of immediate use cases of lower four bit, let's call it more standardized space stations. If we're talking about something that's a little bit bigger and a proper space station. And we can have sci fi references like you mentioned Larry Niven's or one of Larry Niven's books, Ringworld. For listeners who don't know that it's a great book, you should read it. But that's basically like a ring around an entire planet. So that's, that's very, very big.

Yes.

So let's not even go there. But let's say do you have any favorite sci fi space stations? I mean there's so many where there's like, I don't know, Deep Space Nine and Star Trek or Tigo station in the Expanse or is there any sort of reference that you have in your mind that you think, oh this is very cool, this is like what something like a large scale station in space could look like?

Yeah. So two references come to mind you hit on one of them, which is the Expanse series. It's a modern sci fi series that I think does the best of any recent sci fi and showing a very credible near term being in the next few hundred years future between Earth, Moon and Mars. And like what are the interplay between those three and yeah, there's a number of space stations in that series that are really compelling. Tycho is interesting because it has artificial gravity, which is now kind of the next thing that Aurelia is looking at working on. Again, we're a nonprofit. We're not trying to compete with Vast or the different amazing companies that are also doing their own version of artificial gravity. Our goal is to create really far future early stage R and D and then work with those groups to try to help humanity advance into things like a real artificial gravity space station. Now the reason that I like artificial gravity, we know that humans can't live in orbit indefinitely. It's really bad on our physiological systems. Scott Kelly Some of the astronauts that have spent upwards to a year in space, they really do, who come home with significant issues in their physiological systems. Bones, heart, health, eye shape, all these changes. The best thing we can do in space, if we actually do want to live more steady state in space, is we need to spin our habitats, create centripetal force at the right rate and at the right size or diameter of a habitat to create approximately 1G at the edge of that ring. And so the other example I was going to give you that does this nicely, taiko station is one, the other is 2001 space.

Yes.

Classic iconic image of this rotating artificial gravity. You see the person in the magnetic boots walking along the outside of the treadmill. That's basically the outer ring where you.

Got one G. I actually really like that because that's like. I think that's. What is that, late 60s maybe. I mean again, this is like it's so retro that it's got this retro cool look even on the interior. Actually, I would use that if the space stations look like that on the.

I know we all want mid century modern furnishings. Yeah.

So while you're talking about sort of spinning stuff, I forgot to ask you, but so not sci fi, but like a long standing proposal. I'm sure you also, you read Gerard o' Neill's book and o' Neill cylinders. Is that something you also like somewhere reference to or.

It is. And this is so timely that you're asking us because guess what 2025 is? 2025 is the 50th anniversary of the iconic NASA summer study, the a Stanford study in 1975 that produced the Stanford Torus. One really big donut ring and produced some of the work, well, really captured some of the work that Jerry o' Neill had been doing around o' Neill cylinders. So Aurelia Institute is going to have a really special convening later this summer to celebrate the 50th anniversary of this really seminal moment in space architecture. And so, yes, those references are absolutely a big source of inspiration for us. The ironic thing about that was that was 1975 and they thought that they'd have 10,000 people living and working in orbit by the 1990s. So basically 20 years from when that report came out, obviously we haven't quite achieved that vision. But I think it's partly because Cold War ended, US government stopped spending quite as much of our GDP on space. And now what I think is actually much more optimistic is we still have amazing government investment in space. But as you and I know from our experience as VCs, we also have this really impressive of economy coming up and a private economy coming up to sustain activity in space. And so I think we're in a much healthier space domain now. Much more likely that we can actually achieve something like these amazing summer study structures.

Yeah, fingers crossed. I think that, I mean, you and I talk a lot about this. On the investing side. One key is obviously we have to make some of these commercial use cases work so people have a reason to have these structures in space. But. But you and I are working on that and spending our, spending our investors money and hopefully this will work out over the next few years.

But why we're so focused on leo, you know, for those initial examples I gave you, there's so much concrete opportunity and money to be made and public good to be served by this work in low Earth orbit. So you and I are enjoying talking about Mars and you know, further out. But I think there's a lot of benefit that the public will have and that the, you know, growing cislunar space economy will see in the next decade a lot of value creation coming.

Yeah, I mean, naturally I'm biased, of course, I agree. So I come back to the sort of that investment theme, so to say in a few minutes when we talk about your other endeavor, the Rule of Foundry Fund, but just sort of finishing up on, well, it's called Inspace Architecture and what Aurelia Institute is doing. So you already mentioned a few minutes ago, space architecture. So to our listeners who don't know that is actually a thing. There are space architects out there. I've actually, I went to your event at mit, Ariel. I met space architects. If those people exist, they exist. And we also referenced sort of the design element, how cool the 2001 space station design was. So one question I had on my mind is, so you're an engineer by training, right? But I also had a chance to visit your little mock up structure that you had just outside of Boston a few months ago. And actually it looks quite cool in, in or I thought it was quite cool. In your mind, sort of. How do you balance the. What's the right balance between form and function? Function clearly being very important in space, kind of keeping people alive in all of this. How do you find that balance?

So we start by appreciating that the very first requirement for all of these space structures is survival. So we have to be able to keep humans alive and safe and well. And NASA has really developed quite a lot of sophistication in this domain, as have now some of these other commercial providers that are going to come online to take over the International Space Station. But something that's unique about our work at Aurelia is we take a human centered design perspective, almost more like a traditional architecture and design perspective from Earth. And we say we're designing for a future with millions of people living and working in space. And that means that the spaces that we construct, people need to do more than survive, they need to thrive in them. And so we are integrating design and comfort and care and these other elements of what makes a home a lovely home to live in or what makes makes a stunning building on Earth something where you really want to inhabit it. And we're now basically saying we want it to be a life in space worth living. And so we do try to balance very carefully this absolute functional requirement that it is safe and is going to be working for survival, but maybe can also work for thriving. And in that wonderful example, thank you so much for referencing the pavilion. We just launched last summer. A human scale mock up, so 25ft wide, big geodesic dome of the Tesserae space habitat. And we outfitted the inside to look like a 2000 and 30s futuristic habitat that is a kitchen, basically a communal space to break bread together in space. And we had all of these interesting sci fi inspired artifacts and elements which intentionally look really different than the International Space Station. It's not just pragmatic engineering hardware and pipes and wires and that kind of thing. We're really trying to design a holistic beautiful, compelling space that can also keep people alive.

Okay, that's great. And again, I love the mock up you had there. So let's switch gears over to the Aurelia Foundry. Why did you decide to, I mean, Aurelia Institute sounds like there's a lot of work to do there. Why did you decide to also like start Orillia Foundry and then if you can talk a little bit about what the thesis is behind Aurelia Foundry, what you would like it to be.

Yeah, well, with two American patriotic parents, I am a dyed in the wool American capitalist. And I actually really believe in the value of for profit business to be able to scale great ideas. And one of my mentors when I was starting a really institute, they basically said this is an amazing long term humanities horizons work, but you need to supplement nonprofit work with for profit work to really achieve the big aims that we had for society. So what the fund allows us to do is we say we have this vision of where we think space is headed and democratizing access to space. What is the ecosystem of companies that needs to exist to be able to have this future come to fruition and how can we have it be a really compelling argument for making money near term for our investors? That's what Aurelia Foundry allows us to do to complement the Institute. The other nice way that they interact is we get proprietary deal flow flow out of the institute. So the Institute is constantly coughing up these great new ideas. We've actually just spun out our first internally incubated spin out. And now the VC fund gets to look at that and have its own pipeline of really innovative, interesting companies in addition to the external, you know, best in class space industry companies that we're looking at investing in.

And so is there any particular, let's say topics or investment areas or themes that excite you a lot right now over the next few years?

Yeah, well, so one that I know you and I share is in space manufacturing. So the use of the uniqueness of this microgravity environment for material science, basically things that can be made differently in space than how they would ever be able to be made on Earth. So that's one area that we definitely share the four core investment thesis areas for the fund. The first is satellite satellites. And this is both data products from satellites and the hardware themselves. So interesting new constellations, things like low Earth orbit GPS that has a much better resolution, maybe better national security stance because it's not just concentrating the GPS technology in these big massive assets that are big targets for attack and hacking. So things like that in the satellite domain. And of course that's where a lot of the money in the space industry is now. Calm and earth based observation. Second category that we're interested in is human health. Not yet for astronauts, it's too small of a market, it's too niche of a market. But using the microgravity environment for companies like Land Division where they can create a biotech product that would cure blindness, that would cure macular degeneration on Earth in the coming years. Third category is climate change adjacencies. I think of this as maybe two great examples. How can we use space infrastructure in orbit to do things like space based solar power, deliver clean energy profoundly more efficiently to the surface of the earth. And then also things like H Vac for a habitat. H Vac is a minimum viable product for a space habitat. You have to have direct air carbon capture, take carbon out of the air, really energy efficient air conditioning and really good air filtration. And sadly in this, you know, life that we're living in on Earth right now, that is a trifecta of technologies that we need for homes on Earth. Earth in the face of wildfires, you know, in the face of climate change. So there's a lot of technology that can come from development for the rigors of life in space. The rigor, space engineering have it really benefit a much larger addressable Earth based market. And then the final category is the riskiest, but it's where we think we'll find the next SpaceX. And this is space for space infrastructure. This is where my expertise in self assembly comes in. How are we building the platforms, whether they're space stations or being able to mine helium on the surface of the moon. Interlude. You know, Rob Myerson's amazing company, this next wave of space businesses that we think are going to unlock the next era of the space industry, that space for space infrastructure is really compelling to us, but we'll balance the portfolio across those areas because there's much more risk in that last category and now a little bit less risk in the satellite category.

So that last category then has things like you mentioned, Interlude, that's Helium 3 or a startup that some listeners may know. Rob Myerson Explore Origin Pretending to extract. I don't know if the right word here is mine or extract, but basically collect helium 3 on the lunar surface. And I guess that then hopefully will mean many people, I guess would think that resources will be our excuse to actually start setting up some settlements in places like the moon or Mars. And then Again, for these settlements, I guess you could use some of your technology to set up the habitat and so forth. So it's all, it's all very synergistic.

Yeah, it's meant to be very synergistic. Matt Weinzeral at Harvard. So Matt is a, you know, a good colleague of both of ours and he had this great phrase a couple years ago. What is the killer app for space is the, the business proposition where the business case will close and there's going to finally be enough motivation to the money to get to the moon. And I think Interlune and Rob Myerson's company is a great example of that because we are desperate for helium 3 on Earth already for national security applications and for medical, for MRI technology. And helium 3 will be critical for cooling, for quantum and, and so as those two industries mature, there's going to be even more demand for Helium 3, which is already incredibly rare on Earth, but abundant on the moon. The Moon doesn't have a magnetosphere. Right. The Moon doesn't have that iron core like what the Earth does that' protecting our atmosphere. It means it's been bombarded for eons by the solar wind with the opportunity to have a lot more deposits of helium 3. So really great example of again space for Earth. Go to the moon, get the helium 3, bring it back for Earth based citizens needs here on the surface.

Yeah, and well, you mentioned Matt, Matt Weinsale, Harvard Business School professor and by the way, for our listeners, he'll be on this podcast I think in about a month or so talking about his, this new book. But yeah, great guy in the space sector that we both know well. But yes, I'm with Matt here on this question of what's the killer app. In fact, every time I moderate something like a lunar related panel, I torture the panelists with this question. And so I think I'm with you. Resources must be the most likely one. But then who knows, maybe we wake up one day and it is entertainment like something like UFC on the Moon or it is just tourism. But I think that's fine because whether it's entertainment or tourism, they will also need or can benefit from your space structures. Yes, actually you're quite well positioned there in terms of the use cases. I also really like that. I think it's very important for people like us to think about how these structures, let's go back to law of orbit, how they can be used because we have this. And not all listeners may appreciate this yet. There's a certain type of potential Catch 22 that the startups with the applications like the microgravity manufacturing to use these structures to some extent, many of them will only feel comfortable being entrepreneurs and trying this if they think there is going to be enough capacity there to scale this in low earth orbit. On the other hand the people who built these structures, they want to have the startups who will be the potential customers. And so we have to kind of break this potential catch 22 and one part of breaking it is venture capitalists like us just taking risk and investing. And then of course the government is where very important as well. But since I think a lot of potential, well actual and potential entrepreneurs are listening to this podcast in the inspace manufacturing domain. Is there any sort of use case that you wish somebody was pursuing as a startup that you haven't seen yet?

That's a great one. There are early stage, I mean Varda is doing amazing things. Biotech, there are companies looking at Zblan at pulling fiber. I do think a greater commitment to semiconductor manufacturing would be really useful. It's expensive and it's complicated on earth. So it's a big challenge to be able to undertake in a space environment. But we know from NASA research from decades past that there's this potential for much more pure crystal growth in microgravity. So I think this is something that would be hard for a startup to do alone. It really needs to be a consortium of a startup startup, big government funding some VC bets like we need to basically wrap these people in the infrastructure for success, like the funding infrastructure for success. But that's an area that I think is really worthwhile. I do think some work that red wire has been doing over the last decade is very compelling, which is things like the Archinaut. How do you maybe extrude or self assemble or in space construct lattices and frameworks that could support solid panels or could support radiators or could eventually maybe build the material of a space station itself. So I think more focus on in space extrusion, which is actually some work that I have been doing at MIT with my research partner Martin Nisser. Martin now runs a really cool lab at U Dub out in Seattle. But when we were both still at MIT we worked on this notion of free space extrusion. So you can extrude a UV curable resin flash, cure it with UV light and because you're in microgravity it's not going to set. So you can extrude almost an infinitely long beam. And there's all kinds of, you know, if Potential entrepreneurs are listening to this. You know, take that maybe as a point of inspiration because there's all kinds of really interesting things that could be done in space. Manufacturing, material science with extrusion as a process.

And while you mentioned red wire shout out as well to my friends, I think you know them as well. D cubed in Germany who also doing similar things. Okay.

As we're kind of in particular even separate from extrusion. D cube doing great latch work and then also deployable solar panels which themselves are interesting technologies to be able to really scale.

Absolutely. So as we're coming closer to the end of the podcast, let me take a step back. So the space sector in general, so going beyond just the architecture and settlements is 20, 30 years in the future. Where would you like humanity to be in space? And I don't mean just physical locations, I mean sort of what should we have achieved in a few decades time?

In a few decades time, I think we should have a thriving ecosystem in low Earth orbit. That's three pillars. I think we should have energy, space based solar power, power beaming to Earth, but power beaming in space as well. I think we should have the node of our first space situation city. So you asked me earlier, besides ring worlds, what are we building in space bigger than space stations? What does urbanism in space look like? I think we'll have a sense of urbanism at the scale of thousands or tens of thousands of people in space in that time frame. And then the third I think is vegetation. So how do we do a space garden or how do we grow plants for the future of deep space missions? There's great examples in the Expanse at the very beginning of that series in Ganymede where they're grow huge big domes of space vegetation. It's a big step forward in our sustainability as a species and being able to go out and live in space for long duration without always depending on Earth. So those three pillars, I think we would want to see really compelling early work evolving in the next couple decades in that area.

Yeah. And shout out at that point to another portfolio startup of mine, Interstellar Lab in France, who is building not on the scale of the expanse Ganymede just yet, but it's sort of the idea of having greenhouses, specialized greenhouses in space. Space urbanism, I hadn't heard that before, but. So as we said, there are space architects, I've met a few of them now. But are there space urbanists yet? I mean that seems like something probably at MIT Media Lab in the ecosystem. That's probably space urbanists already planning cities.

Yeah, I mean, we fancy ourselves at a Raelia Institute of beginning to think about that. Our policies. We have three things we do at our Rayla Institute. We do our integration, education and outreach, and policy. And on that policy front, we're beginning to think about space urbanism. What are the principles of a society, you know, from a constitution up to just values that would guide a humanist society forward in space? And then also, what are the pragmatic things? Just like a city on Earth, you have shared utilities, you have limited electromagnetic spectrum that has to be negotiated and shared. You have space traffic management, you have space debris, you basically have trash pickup. All of these things that exist in a city also now need to be navigated as a space urbanism challenge or opportunity. And so, yeah, we're absolutely already thinking about that at Aurelia.

And once we get to a certain size of settlements, which actually not even that big, we'll have things like security as well. Right. So in the expanse, you have even, like, organized crime. And inevitably that will.

That's right. Yeah. We'll need a space sheriff. I had somebody in mind, actually.

Okay. So again, sort of in the context of bigger questions, sort of vision for the future, is there anything that concerns you? Potential things where we can stumble on the way that you think are worth paying attention to?

I mean, we definitely have the risk of space as a tragedy of the commons. We're already seeing that play out with space debris. So the ability to bring together a communal and actually powerful group to think about deconflicting international conflicts is important. So maybe we need something. A colleague of mine at Harvard, Eli Sandler, and I are thinking about a space cop, if you know the cop top series of conferences for climate change. We probably need something building on the tradition and the success of UNUSA and UN cobras that can really bring multilateral, stakeholder collaboration together so we avoid things like the tragedy of the space commons. I think we need to be thoughtful about the impact from rocket launches right now. It's very, very, very small impact compared to commercial aviation. But if you and I succeed and we have this, you know, vision that we're building for the space industry, where there's, you know, a huge increase in the number of rocket launches, we need to think about making sure that we're doing that in a responsible way for Earth's climate system. And I think there are actually really great solutions to that. We won't have time for that today, but that's something that's also on my mind. For the future. Okay.

Do you think there's anything in the broader public's mind? So forget like the space community that you and I spend almost all of our days in, Right, Just the general public. Do you think there's any sort of major misunderstanding that the public still has that you would like to. To clarify?

Yes, I actually think in the last few years, since 2021, when Jeff Bezos and Branson did their flights, the media painted space as a domain only for really wealthy people. And I actually think that's one of the best things that we could correct for the public is space will be the domain of humankind. A bunch of these companies like Blue Origin and Virgin are actually working to bring the costs down to welcome more people to space. And so I think if you're listening to this, this, you know, if you're in your 40s, 50s, you can go to space in your lifetime. And a lot of people don't know that. And so I think really spreading that word that it's about to become a domain like the shift in commercial aviation after World War II, where it became much more popular and much more common and accessible to be able to fly. It's about to be at this major inflection point where space is a lot more accessible and able for common people to be able to access the public. So that's what I would leave you with.

There you go. I love the people who are 40s and 50s, so you don't have to retire to Florida. You may be able to retire to space eventually.

It'll remove the load on your spine, you know.

There you go. That's. That's definitely great for like senior citizens. Erin, I could talk to you for hours, but I have two. We don't have unlimited time today. I have two final questions for you. One is, so you're doing so many things, you're thinking about so many different facets of space. Is there something, something? And it could be anything, like some thought you keep on coming back to regularly. And it could be something positive, something that you think about regularly that really excites you. Or it could also be a worry that makes you wake up in the middle of the night and you're sweat bathed.

I tend to be an optimist, so I'll go with the optimistic one. Something that I think a lot about is how are we approaching the road to space? SpaceX has a particular approach to a it. New Glenn is now coming online. Amazing companies like Stoke that we're lucky to be invested in this new company coming Online. But I do think we need other mechanisms in addition to propulsion to get us into space. So I think about that a lot. What does the road to space look like to get costs down, which is already happening with Starship and with Stoke and really empower this future? It's a huge foundational building block. So I think about that that a lot.

So you mean things ways which are.

Not rockets improving rockets like Andy's work, which I think is a huge bit like Andy's at Andy Lapsa at Stoke is basically building the world's truly first the full set of stages reusable, but then also yeah, mass drivers, other ways to get cargo to orbit that doesn't just require or rely on traditional chemical propulsion. And then related to that, my sci fi brain thinks a lot of about how do we speed up propulsion? Can we get away from propulsion? Can we do nuclear rockets? How do we actually explore the stars? How do we find out if Avi Loeb is right and there's, you know, other life in the universe. We need better, speedier methods of transport and so there's still a lot of innovation needed there.

Oh absolutely. Chemical rockets, you could even argue great for getting out of the Earth gravity well. But for interplanetary transport, we, yeah, we want something like, you know, warp drive or Epstein drive or maybe like a nuclear fusion. But that, that'll be for another episode. Ariel, final question is always the same on this podcast, which is about favorite sci fi. Now we already talked about some sci fi like Larry Niven and the Expanse. Is there any other sci fi works you want to throw out that you really love?

My true favorite, I haven't even actually mentioned yet and it's very timely. So Neal Stephenson's seven Eves, probably my all time favorite science fiction story, features these incredible swarms of small room robots living in symbiosis with a spacecraft. That's not the main plot point. I won't ruin the story, but it's just a really amazing technology piece of the book that I love. We are about to send to the moon next month as part of MIT's to the Moon to Stay mission with intuitive machines and Lunar Outpost, we're going to send a small Astro Ant ant inspired wheeled robot to the moon. Completely directly inspired by Neal Stephenson in this space grade version of of this robot that has spun out of the MIT Media Lab. So I'm a huge fan of Neal Stephenson's sci fi and in particular seven eaps.

Thank you for that and Astro Anze. I wish we had time to talk about that. That sounds very exciting too. But Ariel, thank you so much for taking the time today. This was great. Thank you so much for everything you're doing in the space sector and I'm very happy that you and I are working together so much.

I love working with E2MC. It's absolutely mutual and it's been great to talk with you today. Rafael, thanks so much.

And that's a wrap for another nominal episode of the Space Business Podcast. Once more, if you enjoyed this, please leave us a five star rating on your favorite podcast platforms such as Apple or Spotify. You can follow us on Twitter odcastspace. You can support us at www.patreon.com spacebusinesspodcast. Lastly, if you have any feedback including ideas for guests and that may not include yourself, if you have an interesting space story to tell or interested in being a sponsor, drop us an email@sparebusinesspodcastmail.com See you for the next episode.