StarTalk Radio - The Future of Space Stations with Ariel Ekblaw

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

Can we put the data centers in space? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly map out the future of human habitation, research, and industry in low Earth orbit with Ariel Ekblaw, founder and CEO of the Aurelia Institute. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here:  https://startalkmedia.com/show/the-future-of-space-stations-with-ariel-ekblaw/ Thanks to our Patrons Richard Morgan, Kamila B, Douglas L, Izzi, Robert Lee, Alfredo Giachino, Andy Reinhart, Kacie Blu, Kimberly Freshour, Atmosphere327, Chris Rose, Gsjdhdbdh, Michael Nel, Morgan Shatz, Alfredo Morales, Petr Vlk, FMG, BryN S, Gunner Ford, Ori, Kimberly, David Kříž, Brendan Hanson, Catherine Westbrook, CT Vaughan, Jon West, Luc Gauthier, Smlamartina, DetroitLarry, Dave, Maarten Bakker, Monthen, Alixandria Taylor, Joe Maron, Ben Canty, Stephen Harris, Nandini and Nitin, Angel, Sascha975, Jalene Tangen, Courtney, Marcus, Jorge Coria, Emilio Jaen, Matt Tatro, Nicholas LaLonde, Mark Nicholson, Akira Stiebeling, Brandon Hill, Delphini Papadopoulos, Mauricio Valle, Mark Entel, Leif Callesen, Steven Crofts, Anthony Lofgren, Huzaifa Shabur, Kyle Has the Biggest Shlong in Media, Chase Phyfe, Davin, Greg Gray Lord of Hotdogs, Jeff Kolander, Gosh Dane It 🐍, Lewiathan Godslayer, Eric Tuch, Abiodun Aremu, Krystian Tolloczko, Brad, Ben Weekly, Andor Klomp, CrouchingTiger95, Daniel Wells, Yuki, Kimberly Passick, Zev Clement, Anthony Valle, Titus Clay, Mohsin Khan, Ted McCutcheon, Rudy Cajka, Ronald Nigel McWilliams, Kolten Garrett, Elizabeth Cahill, Joleen Candice, Marion, Lake Whoabegon, K Holzer, Oliver V. Ustinovich, John Ellis, Justin, Stelios Antoniou, Monitor343, M McGa, William Benjamin Broes, Brian Warszona, Lori Peets, Manav Gupta, Marley J. Valdes Toetu'u, Robert Wiscott, Duckie, and Felix Venzor for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Gary, we just learned that the future in space does not include the ISS. It's going down. Space drama. Yeah, hopefully they take the astronauts out first, though. Okay, we'll send Chuck's note along. Coming up, what our future in space will probably look like, because we got the expert on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk.

Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition, which means I got Gary O'Reilly right next to me, Gary. Hey, Neil. And Chuck Nice. What's up, Neil? All right.

So, Gary, I don't know how you came up with this subject. You and Lane over in L.A. All right, yeah, we had a little help from Lindsay Walker. And Lindsay Walker. Yeah, so... My co-author, Lindsay Walker. Yes, and credit to both Lindsay and Lane. All right, let's get into this.

Consider this. The ISS is to be... decommissioned. International Space Station for those who've never listened to this show ever. That's due 2030-2031. So now you start to extend your thought process so what will replace it?

What will Earth's orbit all space look like? What new technologies are going to emerge? Will Earth orbit become an annex for our off-wolding our industries? I love that phrase off-worlding. That's just

That sounds so... It sounds so, like, futuristic and spacey. I mean, I have to get off-world. Right now, I'm telling you, I'm a wanted man, I have to get off-world. Off-world. Yeah, so, I mean, that's going to be prefixed with a big old dollar sign. Yes. Once you start to get into those areas.

There's a lot to unpack, so let's bring on our guests, shall we? All right. We got a guest here. You know, it'll take me half the show to read the credentials here. Then don't read them all. No, I'm going to read them all. No. We have Ariel Ekblah.

Do I pronounce your name correctly? You did, sir. Ariel, welcome back to StarTalk. Thank you. You were last on during COVID. Yes. And I have no memory of anything that happened during COVID.

And I didn't even have COVID. Don't we all? That's not my excuse. So you are founder and CEO. I love anybody who's that of anything. And CEO. Founder and CEO of the Aurelia Institute whose mission is to bring

humanity, space, exploration, future to life. Nice. Working on it. Oh. Making the future now. Now. Yes, okay.

Founder and director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative. Hmm. Look at that. Man, that's serious. Been busy. That's some serious stuff. Just hashtag nerd would also suffice.

Yeah, that's true. Hashtag nerd. Right. Geek Nerd. Squared. NASA Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium on the executive committee of that.

Okay. And you've actually worked on space hardware that's on the surface of Mars right now. Oh, wow. So your parents are really disappointing. Just like, I don't know. What happened? I never did learn to fly. They are.

Oh, God. The underachiever. Get out. Parents are Air Force pilots, both of them. Yes, my parents are both pilots. You're such a disappointment. What's left, though, double pilot parents, you've got to go to space. That's the only thing left.

That's so true. Okay. Mom, dad, stay in the atmosphere. I don't care. So what piece of hardware is on Mars that you touched? Yeah, I got to work on Sherlock on the Perseverance Rover, Mars 2020, which is looking for, in NASA's classic terminology, can't say looking for life,

looking for signs of past, habitability on the Martian surface. Looking for life. Looking for life. That's the current rover. It's still an active rover. It is an active rover. It has a deer stalker hat and a magnifying glass. Just running around in Washington service.

Very Sherlock Holmesie. No, I'm delighted to learn all of this. Now, the bit that you worked on, that was at JPL, I guess, when they assembled it. So you didn't like sneeze on it before they launched it. Not to my knowledge, but they got. And now there is life on Mars. Well, what do you know?

This aerial snobled on Mars that come to life. Snuck past that planetary protection protocol. Right, right. The Andromeda strain is the aerial strain. It's the aerial strain. Oh, God. They bake those things out there. They've got to really heat them up before they send them.

So I'm pretty sure that my little fingerprint gets baked off of that aluminum. Nice. Or the bugger that you put on it when you were. What that too. Stop. Thank you, Neil. Stop. Okay, let me start off here.

So the International Space Station. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when it was debated, when we wanted to make sure, because at the end of the Cold War, all these Russian aerospace scientists, we didn't want them going to our enemy. Right. So the original space. space station, which was called space station freedom, we retooled that to bring in the Russian astronauts, and only then did it become the international space station, bringing in the Japanese

and Europe and the like. So when was that early 90s? So that was 35 years ago, and no one would come near any piece of technology that's 35 years old. Today, oh, for sure. If I say, oh, look at this shoulder-mounted cell phone or whatever. So we have a space station that is way older than anything you would dain to use here on Earth. So just put this in context now. Did they not build in its obsolescence?

Future proof. Future proof. Or future proof. But either we know it's going to be, we're going to drop it out of the sky. Or we have swappable panels everywhere. But now the futures become exponential. So tell me. Yeah.

Yeah, so how do you prepare? I think that's a great point. Yeah, it's basically debated, thought about it. 80s, debated and then built in the 90s, flown in the early 2000. So it's like a home that desperately needs a Renault. It's really old. And what we're looking at now is what's the next opportunity to build modern technology into space architecture fundamentally for this next wave of commercial space stations

that are going to replace the international space station when it does get decommissioned 2030, 2031. Is decommission code for drop it out of orbit? Fiery death. Fiery death. We're going to decommission down. This is sizable. Yes, and it's no small feat for NASA to be able to do that well.

I think there's a lot of orbital dynamics planning and reentry drag engineering planning. What's the difference between something that large and things that are deorbiting all the time? Yeah, whether they burn up completely on reentry, whether they fully incinerate, or whether for the case of the ISS, probably parts of it will end up being intentionally plopped in the ocean or somewhere if it's not fully burning up on reentry. Unless you're China in which. You don't care where you throw your garbage. China. Throwing their garbage all over the world.

This is a very trenchant example because the Chinese did get in some trouble for Tian Gong, one of their earliest space stations, for not deorbiting it properly. So there's a lot of eyes on NASA. I believe in NASA fully at the ability to do this, but there's a lot of eyes on NASA to make sure they do it well.

To do it safely. To do it safely and well means you drop it into the great toilet bowl of space, which is the Pacific Ocean. Yes. Right. And not on land. He's one third of all longitude on Earth. If you can't plunk a satellite into that,

damn, you got problems, right? Yeah. Just don't hit Point Nemo, right? Because on Point Nemo, the crazy thing. Point Nemo is the most remote place on Earth. Is that where finding Nemo went? If only, if we'd know where he was. Yeah.

Yeah. That's good. That's good. I was just learning from the best. I'm learning from the best. That was so good. Okay. So what is Point Nemo?

Point Nemo is the most remote place on Earth. So if you're in Point Nemo, you're farther away from any, other human, any other landmass, except when the International Space Station flies over, then you're only 250 miles away from a human. So when it goes over point numo, you're closer to space humans than you are to Earth humans. Wow. And doesn't that sound like heaven? To be closer to space humans that you are to Earth humans. If you're like a hermit, yeah.

Is there any way you can deassemble the ISS before you bring it back? Yes. I suspect that there will be part of the con-ops, concept of operations, is they're going to pluck some of the different modules apart, rather than just trying to have the entire kind of unwieldy structure with all those solar panels. But why would you do that? Is it because you can reuse it something from 35 years ago? Let the damn thing burn up?

Yeah. So this is the crux of NASA's plan that just got re-announced with ignition. So we have Jared Isaac been, new NASA administrator, exciting times. They are going to double down on this idea that the new commercial space stations, who are going to replace the international space station, First, they attach to the existing ISS, they build up their modules,

and then it's like the phoenix rising from the ashes of the ISS. The remainder of the ISS that's not going to be kind of consumed and built into the future, the remainder of the ISS will be de-orbited. I'm going to say that's a pretty damn good plan. That's a cool plan. That means sending astronauts out and risk of that,

and you're putting people in jeopardy. Space construction, man. What could go wrong? That is awesome. Come on. We all know that when you have space construction, okay, that a jump scare is coming. That's awesome. This is what I'm really passionate about.

How do we start to build things way bigger than the International Space Station, where each module could only be as big as your biggest rocket? They then put a bunch of them together. But what if you could build a room? Just to unpack that. So the biggest module was what could fit in the payload bay of a shock. So there's no. no piece up there that's bigger, unless you guys are going to fold it.

But so all those cylindrial pieces, like within... Oh, crazy tolerances. Crazy tolerance. Right. Because you max that out. Right. And so the shuttle and the space station complete each other. Oh, my cute.

Are we talking flat pack? We are talking to. We're talking IKEA. NASA are going to go to IKEA. You took the thought out of my mind. Because we've told that kilos equal dollars in terms of payload. Okay, go ahead. No, no, so this is where you're taking it?

Where do you get your cues for design? Now we know we're going to flat pack everything. Where do we get our cues from design? Is it the 35-year-old tech, or are we thinking something, or even further back than that? In some sense, even further back. So it's like this vision from science fiction of how do you have massive structures that are way bigger than your biggest rocket payload faring. And there's this idea from Buckminster Fuller, so even well before the International Space Station was designed, of Bucky Balls, Geodesic Domes.

Why do we love spheres in space? Because for a given surface area, you're optimizing for all that volume, most efficient shape. Okay, I can't resist saying this. You're inventing spaceballs. Spaceballs. Awesome. Sorry. We could not keep that in my mind.

Slowly but truly. Space walls. When exactly does dark helmet enter the equation? Was that his name, Dark Helmet? Yes. Not Darth Vader. Not Darth Vader. Not Darth Vader.

Self-assembling space balls. Very nice. That's the idea. So either why not or in addition to would you not use printing? Since we are now able to print extremely strong, very light metals. So 3D printing. Yes, 3D printing. Yes.

I think the answer is yes and. Okay. So we definitely want innovative structures in space. We want self-assembling modular things. Gotcha. The reason we want modularity that's not just 3D printed, because when it's 3D printed, it's solid. It's a done deal. If you get damage on one of my modular flat-packed panels that have since popped out of their can,

self-assembled, you can remove a tile, pop a new one off, or if you had a window tomorrow. It's Legos. It's Lasos. It's Space Legos with magnets. If you're making a... With magnets. Yes. Nice.

Oh, okay, we'll get on to magnets. And since you're in zero-g, you will never step on a stray Lego piece and hurts your feet. Yes. You'll never hear an astronaut in the middle. Well, it's always the middle of the night go. Let's leave your leg on the house. Exactly right. So if you're making the spherical construction, that's tessellation of shapes.

So that becomes biomimicry? It does. My PhD at MIT was really inspired by ideas and biology of how nature self-assembles. What department was that? I was in between Aeroastro, Course 16, and the MIT Media Lab, which is very creative architecture. Yeah, I know. Yeah, we've had people from there here before.

Right, so you, they couldn't fit you anywhere, so you had to straddle. Wow. Yeah, all right, all right. Okay, the irony is you wouldn't trust a 35-year-old technology. No, I wouldn't. But we've gone to Mother Nature for cues to design the future. Tell me some of your nature cues. Yeah, yeah, that's cool.

Self-assembly, like how proteins fold with a body or fold up into DNA. Very cool. And then other examples of small units, like swarms of termites and ants. They can take their tiny little bodies and. bridge a gap that is bigger than an individual. They self-attached to each other. They create structures.

If they had a bigger brain, we would be nervous. Yes, they would be. However, if they had a bigger brain, you'd never be on the bottom of those structures when it comes to floods. That's how they survive floods. Yes. Yeah.

Because they just... They climb on top of each other, create a raft, and then the ones on the bottom, they're just like, I'm so sorry. Sorry, Adam. Oh, God. Adam gave himself for us. Just a quick brain fact recently learned by me.

We grew up hearing that, of course, we don't have the biggest brains, but we're the biggest brains relative to our body weight. You have to perform some math magic to get us back at the top of that list. Otherwise, we're fourth. Whales, dolphins, and elephants. Got to normalize that. Exactly. However, that's not even true.

We're only fourth, we're only the top of the brain-to-body weight ratio among mammals. If you bring in mid-sized birds Because birds are very light Yes they are You bring in mid-sized birds We are behind birds Wow And you know who beats everybody out

Who? Some species of ant And you know they got big heads Yes, they have big heads You see the heads I'm just saying It's just back checking us here Talking about these ants

Yeah, I'm just saying You got ants doing everything you're describing They're probably doing calculus in their head That wouldn't be funny Yeah Stupid humans Still trying to figure out calculus Jesus Christ, look at them building above ground housing.

The asses. That's right, take them to Mars. They're going to help us do that all that below ground. Have them do all the construction. There you go. I've always wondered why Hollywood aliens tend to have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, ears, head, shoulders, neck,

arms, legs, fingers, toes. Maybe it's because an actor is donning a costume. That's one of them. reasons why I wrote, take me to your leader. It's to explore all that is possible in this universe beyond what has yet to be imagined by Hollywood. So that for your first alien encounter, you'll be prepared. You'll have some anticipation of what they could look like, what kind of ship they arrived in, what you should or should not say, or should or should not presume. I narrated the audiobook.

The print version is available as well. You better get the book now before you have that first alien encounter, because afterwards it'll be too late. Ariel. Yes. I want an answer to this. Okay. Why are you and NASA ignoring what every sci-fi writer knows?

Hmm. You rotate your space station. You do. So that no one has to complain about bone loss and zero-g and my muscle loss and I, and rotate something so you get artificial gravity. Your ear problems, all of that. I got a five-step plan. You do?

This is phase zero. Yes. Oh, well, do tell. So get them self-assembling first. So pack them flat in a rocket, get that IKEA furniture. Fine. Pop them out like a little pez dispenser. The magnets help the tile self-assemble.

The first structure is a sphere because we want a microgravity lab because we want to do biotech research that we can't do. For the companies that are doing research. And for scientists, like where I come from, from MIT, all of that. But then the future, absolutely, is to try to tessellate structures and then spin them. And so at O'Reillia Institute, our nonprofit, where we do all of this space architecture research, we've just released a paper on artificial gravity and our particular take on it. All right.

So you said about magnetism, self-assembly, but there's a lot of magnetism around in space and other environmental issues. So you've got that to do with. What do you mean? What are you talking about? What kind of space junk? Earth's magnetic field. Yeah. Got to consider that when we have magnets.

Yes, space junk. It's not all that strong. And then you've got to make sure you've got a 100% seal. Yes. On every facet of every tile. This was the hardest question. Yeah, that makes sense. Yes.

And so the trade-off to modular self-assembly is you get all these seams. So what do we do with the seams? The magnets are what bring the exoskeleton together. So click, click in this big sphere. And then between every... So you're using magnets in lieu of bolt? and other fastening devices. In addition.

So the magnets pull the tiles together while they're still separated. So instead of using propulsion or a consumable like airperson... You're exploiting a force of nature to do this. A free force of nature. Exactly. Because you couldn't do it on Earth

and this is the elegance of self-assembly in space. You don't have the workforce issue. There's no friction. So I hadn't put all this together the way you clearly have. If you have magnetic forces to otherwise more,

Move pieces in space. Yes. Requires some active propulsion. Right. And if there's already a built-in force, then you've got it. You don't need them. Then the magnets come. Okay.

All right. So now step two. Let me finish what I'm talking about. Okay. So now you said, now we use the fancy with tessellate. Okay, fine. You tessellate. And what's another word she used?

I'm not telling you. You're going to build a structure that you then will set rotating. Yes. What sets it into rotation? Ah. So the initial spirit. that we're talking about, the Bucky Ball is not going to rotate. What we're working on for the artificial gravity is more of what we call like a zylam.

You know those tubes and plants that go up vertically along the length of the plant stem? Yes. We want to align a bunch of... That has a word of Xylem? Zilom and flowem. This is my like fourth grade memory from... Okay. Zilum and flowem.

So this is separate from the self-assembling bucky ball. But for the rotating artificial gravity station, the paper that we just put out is a bunch of cylinders. and you put the cylinders next to each other in a ring, and then you spin that ring. And what sets that moving is you're going to have a bunch of motors, basically. You're going to have a bunch of traditional mechanized systems to get that going. But something has to take on the angular momentum in the opposite direction. So what is that going to be?

So we have a bunch of balance ballast. And the structure that we're doing is we're trying to think about, if you think about a typical ring, like 2001 Space Odyssey. Typical, typical. Typical sci-fi ring. In the movie. Well, we're a sci-fi nurse. Yeah, typical sci-fi ring.

So it's basically a ribbon. It's a ribbon. Yeah, yeah. And that's the, and then the gravity is radial. It's radial. It's a radio. Right. The dirty little secret about that is if you're a human walking along that ring,

you're going to feel different gravity. At your head. At your feet. At your feet. Yes. Which is a lot of weird cross- coupling effects for your vestibular system. So we've changed that. Unless the ring is really huge.

Yes. And then the difference will be small. Then we're talking like, yeah, 100 kilometers. If you could pull off a ring that big, very small. And then you won't feel sick, right? Because you're spinning, but you're spinning so slow and huge diameter. How do we do artificial gravity in 10 years and not 100 years? That massive ring could be 100 years from now.

What do we do in the next 10 years to make it more feasible? Instead of a ribbon of a ring, that was a great word. We have these cylinder pipes where the gravity level is consistent when you're occupying it. So you're not changing the gravity from foot to toe. So it's kind of like changing the geometry a little bit. Ultimately, it is a ring of cylinders. that then gets spun. Right, so everywhere within a cylinder

has the same force of gravity. That's the idea. Okay. It's at that same. But then what am I doing in that cylinder? I want to get to over here. That's where the gym is, and this is where the mess hall is.

You do have to transit, and so we can't completely remove the cross-coupling effects. If you're climbing towards the center, maybe the docking center of the ring, you're going to go from normal gravity. One G to zero. Gradually floating. But you can do a ladder,

you can do ergonomic techniques to help get the humans up there. So to be so worried about this variation from feet, to head. Yes. When you apparently weren't worried when I was in no gravity at all.

So what's a little gravity gradient between friends? Between friends, between moments, one moment to the next. It turns out it's tricky to basically have the human experience these gradient shifts.

You really want to, when you go into zero gene... How do you know that? We know that because of amazing studies done at MIT and elsewhere. There's some dude walking around right now who has zero balance at all. It's just falling all over the place.

And Mike thinks he's drunk. He's the one that she did the experiment on. Exactly. It's carnival rides. We get the gravitron going and we play with people inside of it. Kind of true. Okay. I remember the gravitron.

That's the rotating thing. Yeah. Yeah, it's a centrifuge. Flying saucer. Yeah. Human-sized centrifuge. So we learned some from that, from studies in that. And then there's also been a lot of science about when the astronauts first get to the

international space station, sometimes there's space sickness. They have to acclimate to the zero-g environment. So we don't want you to be in a constant state of, are you in, real gravity, you are you in zero-g? You kind of want to pick one or the other, and then give the humans as much time as possible to acclimate in those different regimes. That's very cool.

Yeah. And so with the gradient changes from head to foot, in zero-g, you wouldn't have that at all, because there is no head-to-foot in zero-g. There's no upper-down. There's no upper-down. There's no floor. Exactly right. Okay, got you.

The reason we're so excited about this first phase and then we're working towards our artificial gravity phase, but the first phase where you're staying floating. It's a big sphere. You're floating in a big sphere. We call it a geode because you have to think about how to subdivide a sphere on the inside. It's not a rectangular prism. So it's like little crystal chambers is kind of how we think about it.

We want to do biotech. We want to do space infrastructure for the benefit of life on Earth first. And then we can kind of earn our right as a species to say, now let's go do artificial gravity, spin our habitat on the way to Mars, and go explore the rest of our souls. Okay, so you touched on biotech. Can't we do basically almost everything you can do, and the space station here on Earth.

In terms of, you have the protein folding, Alpha Fold 3? Yep, Alpha Fold 3. All those aspects that gave them 90 plus percent accuracy on prediction. Alpha Fold 3 got the Nobel Prize, right? With David Baker and Demis Hasabas there, AI folding for proteins. Yeah, just one of the above. Protein.

We have their head of IT. Protein folding. Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. Here's a great question. What can you do uniquely in the zero-g environment that you can't do on Earth? I think there are...

I only know one thing, can I say it? Yeah, yeah. You can make perfect ball bearings. Yes. Wow. Because the force is, like back to her sphere comment. The sphere minimizes surface area and maximizes volume. Perfect ball bearing.

That's all I know that you can make in space. And that hits on kind of the fundamental principles that you want to think about when you're saying, what can you only do in space? You have no convection. So hot air is not rising, cool air is not sinking. You have no sedimentation, nothing sinking down. And for a lot of biological. biotech processes, that's huge

to get rid of sedimentation. And by the way, they took a case of wine and put it up into the space station. Do you have a bottle? I feel like someone's got to give you a bottle of that. I can neither confirm nor deny. No, the point was, so one case went up and one stayed on Earth. And then they left it there for like,

did the twin experiment. It's the twin experiment. There was exactly a case of identical wines. And they brought it back, and they wanted me to comment officially on what effect zero G had on the wine. And I felt bad saying this, but if you're in zero G, the sediment doesn't know what to do.

And so that's the same thing as you go into your cellar, pull out a ball, shake it out of bed, and put it back in. Like it's going to make it terrible. You're simulating the one in space. You just shake everything all the time. Dr. Tyson, here's the wine.

I cannot believe you bring this to me. Your wine is absolute swill. Keep going down the list. Yeah, so what can you do? So you don't have any convection. You don't have sedimentation. And then you have things that we typically think of as a difficulty, but in space can be a feature, not a bug.

So use the vacuum or use radiation to do something. Oh, wow. So on the first two, the convection and the lack of sedimentation, you can do tissue engineering in zero. in a way that you cannot do on Earth. And a wonderful example is this company, Lambda Vision, that's doing artificial retinas, takes 200 layers of a really delicate little protein,

and if you do it on Earth, you get little sagging effects, and with 200 layers, that amplifies the error. Is this Lasix? It's not Lasix. It's not Lasix. Yeah, it's a different process. It's bacteria and endopsin. No, that's why I ask.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so it's making, Lasix is when they use light to make a change to your eye. This is growing a new retina in space that is because you're floating, you get this perfect little cell matrix. You get this perfect structure. They have figured out a way to stabilize it and bring it back down to Earth

so that you can actually have the surgery and the implantation on Earth. Oh, that's crazy. We are now talking to some serious low-Earth orbit economy. Exactly. No Earth orbit manufacturing, ball bearings, tissue engineering, fiber optic cable. So this becomes pharmaceutical. Yes. However, you know.

for world, the rarest of rare issues will get lost. Whereas the big... The rare ailments within people. There's no money in it. So the big, that big ticket number sort of issues, they'll be brought in. They'll be brought in. It's true.

And a great example of that is Merck's cancer drug, Ketruda, is a $30 billion cancer drug. That's right. They took it to space to figure out, they basically did a parameter sweep looking at the crystallization of the drug in space. And the amazing thing for Ketruda is they figured out a way to get more precise, consistent size of the crystallization of the drug,

and it took it from an ivy drug to a shot. So huge for patient quality of life. You don't have to go into a hospital. You couldn't replicate or extrapolate that on Earth. Well, what they did, that's the magic of some of the tools now that we have on Earth. To your earlier point that some of the things on Earth are getting so close to being good for space, for the Ketruda, the cancer drug, they use space to do this parameter sweep of a bunch of data that would have been really hard to get on Earth.

And then they figured out what it was. You're exploring all the variables that affect an outcome. Exactly. And so you'll know what not to do, how to repeat. Exactly, right. But then they were able to figure out how to mimic part of the parameters that they did get in space on the ground. So they don't have to make every dose of KTruda on the International Space Station. No.

So there's two examples. Tissue engineering. It's physical. It's at a macro scale. Even though we think of it as tiny, it's really macro scale for biology. that's good for those of us who want to build real estate and have a reason to expand our footprint in orbit. And then there's protein formulation and crystallization

where maybe we get the data from space and then we help use that to inform Earth-based processes. So in the future, there'll be a shelf of bio-pharmaceutical products made in space. Made in space. Spice lamps. Look at that. We went from Made in Taiwan and Made in Space.

There is a great company called Made in Space. They got acquired a couple years ago. They're doing 3D printing like what you were at. asking about. Oh, very cool. And yeah, this is what we want to do with our first version of Tesserae, which is what we call the self-assembling ball. We want it to be an orbital biolab with shelves and shelves and shelves of experiments that are

good for life on Earth. And my mission is to design it in a way that my graduate students at MIT could go and do their own experiments. Up there. As a citizen, scientists, well-trained, but not astronauts in their whole career. And that, I think we're just at the cusp where the cost to get to space is getting low enough where that could be feasible in the next decade. I was going to ask you that.

A commonly quoted price, it was $10,000 a pound to orbit. And that's dropped in the era of SpaceX with reusable boosters and things. What is it now? It's about $1,500. Forgive me, I'm going to switch units on you. It's $1,500 a kilogram. This is America.

I know. I'm a scientist. Wow. Wow, you said it like those two things are incongruent. Damn. I'm very patriotic. That was rough. Okay, just speak the metric slowly.

Yes, go. About $1,500 a kilogram today. With Starship coming online, and these are not Elon's numbers, this is like independent analysis, it's expected to be $200 a kilogram. Damn. Which is like FedEx. That's right. If you can ship something around the world, cargo, humans are a little more fragile, will a more expensive. But if you can ship cargo around the world, you can ship it to space.

and that is unlocking this incredible inflection point in the space industry. That's very cool. You know what? Can we, because I think we skipped a step here, and there's a gap in the construction. Because Gary asked about the seams, and that's very important because you can bring magnets together. But we're talking about the vacuum of space.

We are. So now, when you have these panels, what's going to keep this? Yeah, because you need something to keep you. What holds your air pressure? What holds it? Duck type. Seal. Velcro.

Made in space duct tape. Yeah, we prefer Velcro. Okay. No, we do clamps. So between all of the seams of this tessellated bucky ball that's made out of hexagons and pentagons, those are the tiles that come together with the magnets. Just a quick second.

Isn't that a soccer ball? You read my mind. Yes. From 1970s, that's the tessellation. It is. That's the black and white ball. Right, the black and white ball. Now it's very different, but that was the 32 panel ball, yeah.

Exactly. It is a glorified soccer ball. We're sending a soccer ball to space. I played soccer as a kid. Maybe this influenced me more than I realized. The only thing is, I'm now saying, do you make a gigantic space ball? Or do you now daisy change a certain size?

Every time you say baseball, I can't help us. I know. It's female Brooks in your mind. And just dovetailing that. Yes. As you know, we have Bucky Tubbs. Yes. Where you break the ball in the middle and you extend it. And you expand it.

And you use the carbon geometry. You mimic that, I guess. That is an idea for. for how to maybe eventually do a big diameter ring. It's a Bucky tube with some curvature. It's a Bucky Taurus. It's a Bucky Taurus. It's a Taurus.

Excuse me, let's get mathematical on it. It changes. It does compress the tiles on the inside because you get that curvature. But that's the base concept that we're trying to riff on. But yeah, it's a glorified soccer ball and the clamps are what keep the air pressure in. So you're going to have force due to air pressure push it out.

Because air pressure is pushing out. There is no other pressure out there. And so everything kind of like a lot of, Kind of like the airplane, because that's what happens in the fusillade. Except it's not zero pressure outside. Exactly. And they don't pump the plane to atmospheric pressure. Right.

They drop it a little. Yeah. But, of course, whatever this is, it's nothing compared with going to the bottom of the ocean. Oh, right. Interesting. Because you have 10, 20, 20, 30, 50 atmospheres of pressure is ready to crush your ass. That's right. Whatever is your vessel.

Deep's the Marianas trench. It's 35,000 feet deep. That's more than Everest. It's farther down than Everest is tall. Relative to sea level. I'm just saying that in space, you only have one atmosphere. One atmosphere. The delta is much better, much more favorite.

Wow, that's cool, man. I love that. So clamps. Hello, I'm Finky Broke Allen, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Nailed Grass Tyson. There's an old saying in my field,

how do you make a telescope cost 100 times as much? Put it in space. Wow. So we try to do everything we can on Earth surface because the same amount of money that gives you one space telescope gives you 10 or 20 Earth-based telescopes. So we're very careful about... Really justify.

We have to completely justify what we're doing in space. And so the cost of getting the experience, up there, doing the experiment, and bringing it back. Yes. That's huge. It is huge. You can build whole laboratories here on Earth for that cost. Right.

So who's doing that calculation? Who's... So this is a great question. When we think about what makes sense to uniquely do in space, we kind of want to rule out all the other different ways to do it here. And we want to do the cheaper things here first. So the first thing we might do is a zero gravity flight, right? But if you're working with biology, biology responds on the orders of,

days and weeks, not seconds. Yeah, the zero gravity flight is at most. 20 to 30 seconds. Yeah, yeah. Affectionally known as the vomit comment. Yeah, yeah. In fact, when they, I was told this, I had no reason to doubt it,

when they filmed Apollo 13 with the director Ron Howard, that was a million zillion segments of these 90 seconds bits. Wow. And they do it again. Do it again. And the plane has to go up and come down. and then it's stitched together as one continuous zero g-scene.

Exactly. I have done 14 of those flights in my life. I've never puked. My parents would disown me. Oh, God. But they're amazing. This is one of the creepers of the ways. I would puke like this, by the way. I'm the inadequate stuff. Okay. That's funny.

But yeah, so you really, I think you raise a great point to is you want to only use space when you really have to be up there. And so there's a lot of mechanisms and things in biology you can do here. We just want to get to space for the absence of convection, sustained lack of sedimentation for weeks or months at a time.

So you do a really long-scale experiment like tissue engineering that's going to be economically viable to do in space. Plus in space, if you needed something to sediment, you just centrifuge it. Yes, exactly. You can always add back in the Earth effects in zero-G.

So here I am thinking, who's financing this? Yes. Is it the biotech guys? Is it government? Is it someone with an awful lot of money in the bank and just, yeah, I'll do this because they want to corner that particular part of the market. And biotech in low-earth orbit is one aspect of a whole load of off-world industries

that might just occur. And let me put a question just ahead of that. Sure. I was active in an advisory roles in the government at the time this came up. It was the space station, when it runs its course, should it be deputized as a national, lab. Right. Right. Because if it's a national lab,

we already know how to sustain national labs. We've got, there's Los Alamos, there's Brookhaven. Right. So we know that model. And what national labs do is the government does research that's not quite ready for the quarterly report.

Right. Okay. Or the annual report. It's just a little farther down the horizon. So the government is investing in itself, but on a horizon that ROI, venture capitalist, corporate folks. They're not willing to go out. That's right. And then you would apply for time on the station.

Yes. And the government would supplement that. Right. And so whatever became of that. That, it's funny that you mentioned that. That is what they did towards the end of the ISS. It did happen. ISS National Lab, ISS and L.

It did happen. It did happen. And it has been. Pat me on the back. Yeah. It's good enough. Do you need this insurance? Yeah.

I was one of several people who, That made complete sense in the day. And that enabled my PhD. Because as a student, I was able to get basically subsidized support to fly my little self-assembling prototypes via ISS National Lab. Now I think we're 10, 15 years after that. Now we are ready for commercial space. And so what NASA is going to do to replace the International Space Station is truly commercial modules where these companies like Axiom are getting hundreds of millions of dollars in VC investment. People out there really do.

you believe they can make money off of not just biotech, but also ball bearings. And this would be their module or their Bucky ball. This would be their tube. They're going to go back to a pressure cylinder. We want our Bucky ball to be an appendage on the Axiom space station or the Voyager Star Lab or the vast space station. So we will be kind of next-gen habitat tech that gets tested out in the next five years on the attachment side of a more traditional space station that's going to replace the

international space station. So we're talking about a new financial. frontier that's benefiting them, not us. Because the only... Private enterprise. Private enterprise. The biotech guys. No, there's a medicine at the end. They become billionaires, but then you don't die tomorrow. How's that? That's the trick. It's like it's actually better than just it being science fiction, like going to die on Mars. It's about infrastructure on Earth and where are they selling.

It's Earth-based markets. It has to come back down and be of pragmatic use to someone on Earth for it to make sense. So I think that there's a nuance there. It can benefit life on Earth. Although there's a lot of research about what you do in space that serves other needs in space. We have a whole colony on the moon. Yeah. And you do something in space. It might be cheaper to take it to the moon than back to Earth.

You mean to the studio where you guys faint it? So ironically, you want to get in on the ground floor with investment, but you're out in space. Oh, I see what you did there. Thank you very much. So it appears, I haven't been able to keep up with all these space startups. And it seems that they each have a niche bit of technology that they want to contribute to this going forward.

And looking forward in the Artemis, not even lower Thorpe, Artemis, every next mission is trying to bring in more private space enterprise to basically offload what NASA might have done. Instead of NASA pitching tent, get someone else to pitch tent. Instead of NASA building an orbital lunar space station and get somebody else to do it. And is that going, as you'd expect?

It is. I mean, NASA has this playbook with the International Space Station, where they got SpaceX to begin doing commercial missions to ferry crew and cargo to the ISS. It worked incredibly well. People give SpaceX a lot of credit, but really it was that NASA model shifting and the government contracts

that enabled SpaceX's amazing growth today. Also, that space was didn't care if they blew up rockets, where if NASA blows up a rocket, and everybody goes. Those freaking... People lose their shit. Bad crap, crazy. Yes.

Yeah. They were able to build like a cult of personality around SpaceX because they got people engaged in the iterative prototyping and the failure. But yeah, NASA was never given

the space to do that and that is a tricky dilemma there. Yeah, because you're up against the failure is not an option. Right. Ethos from Apollo 13. Love that guy. If you're doing something

that's never been done before, you have to say this. Failure has to be an option. You have to iterate. It's part of your success. Yeah, that is. Yeah. And so that same playbook

that worked with SpaceX for the International Space Station, NASA's doing for the moon, called Clips, commercial lunar payload services. They're getting commercial companies to provide the transportation and the landing infrastructure for NASA to then be able to go out and do the science. And I think that there's a tension between watching NASA seed some of these activities to private enterprise. But what it's allowing NASA to do is what NASA does best. Let's free up NASA from the bit of an albatross of the International Space Station.

let's let NASA go figure out if there's life on Europa. That's something only NASA could do. And I think eventually we have to free money. And there's no money in that at all. Right. It's not commercial. Is there a chance, though, because private enterprise is about one thing and one thing only, and that is profit, is there a chance that things like quality and integrity of mission and things along those lines would suffer in the pursuit? By cutting corners.

By cutting corners. Pursuit of optimizing profit. I think this is a really important question for NASA. And part of what they have done is kind of hybrid themselves into this new domain for private enterprise by doing public-private partnership. So VAST and Axiom, they're still working closely with NASA because NASA has these incredible standards

for the safety of human spaceflight. So I think what we're hoping to see in the space industry is that we don't just toss out everything that NASA learned. We take the best of what NASA learned, and we take some of the maybe better agility that the commercial company would have and we try to marry the two together. It doesn't mean that there won't be the exact risks that you said,

but it means that we're trying our best to get the best of both worlds into this next phase. So by the way, this has fascinating precedence with the birth of airmail. So the government says, hmm, this is a newfangled thing called aeroplane. And mail is a big part of who and what you are as a country. Maybe we can move it by aeroplane.

So the government says, who can carry this load of mail? At what price? And so people climb over each other to try to get that contract. And by climbing over each other, they're making better and better and better airplanes. And they've reached a point where you can carry so many bags of mail, you say, forget the mail, I'm carrying people. And it transitions from just cargo to people. And just the model here is just the interplay between the needs of a government and the needs of a private. I never even thought that that would be a progression, but it makes sense.

There's no U.S. Postal Service airplanes. They're flying in the belly of Delta Airlines. Right, right. And apparently right now I'm not getting lunch, but. Okay. So that partnership is so time honored. It's not even thought about it anymore. And that's a great metaphor too, because that inflection moment that we saw with aviation

where the cost started coming down, more people started flying. It went from you dress up to go into. first class and it was a luxury thing to now. Sweep pants. Yeah. I think we will eventually see sweatpants to moon. You know, we will eventually see. Oh, God forbid.

Oh, pajamas. You go to the supermarket in your pajamas and your crocs. And then you just go to the lunar to space. You don't know your crocs in space? Crocs in space. I'm more Birkenstocks girl, but yeah, we have to. We could take crosses space. If we're looking at Luna and we're looking at off-world industry,

are we looking at data centers? taking them to the moon, are we looking then at solar power? And that becomes a very different scenario and we're taking away an issue here on the surface of Earth. Right, right. But we really want to, because, okay, maybe I'm, I could be wrong here

because you two are the scientists. We will totally tell you if you're wrong. But Ariel just said a little earlier, there's no convection in space. The big problem with data centers is they give off an inordinate amount of heat. If there's no convection, then you need some place to push that heat. Yes.

So then you would end up... It's the single biggest challenge. Right. I mean, what do you do then? Yeah. This is, you have hit on the crux of the tension around this idea of AI data centers in space. Take one step back and say, yes, we should be figuring out how to do big infrastructure in space and offworld. It's just like we were talking about at the beginning of the show.

For data centers in particular, what we think is going to have to happen is use a self-assembled approach like Tessori to hand. to handle that, because if you have a traditional data center, you have these little volcanoes of heat in the servers. You have to pipe out the heat via conduction to these huge radiators. And all you can do in space is radiative cooling. It's radiative heat transfer. If you had all of your computers.

Just be clear, so three ways you can move energy. So one of them is radiative. But the other two, which we live with here, we don't even think about it. It's conduction and convection. And convection, and convection. as you said, requires gravity for the light stuff to rise. Conduction is really slow.

It's like, I'm jiggling, and now you're jiggling, and you're jiggling. So that's why the fireplace poker, it'll take 20 minutes for the handle to get hot when the other end is in the side. That's not an efficient way to move energy. So the radium is just, it's photons coming off the surface carrying out into space. Okay, so pick it up there. So what we're trying to do with our decentralized tech for building things, things even besides habitats is can we use this self-assembly mechanism.

Put the compute that you need on an individual tile. Put a solar panel that you need on that tile to get the energy you need. And on the backside is your radiator. Whoa. And so you're doing hyper-localized energy harvesting and radiative heat transfer for an AI data center. Brilliant. Are you able to scale that? So that's the vision for something like this that tessellates.

It's like a honeycomb. You can finally, with this architecture, make something the size of four, football fields that you could never origami up into a single rocket. So that's what we're trying to unlock. I love that. I used to do origami, so I'm feeling it. That one just got me excited.

That's really cool. Do you origami? I origami. I origami. Do we all learn? So I love the idea that your tile that is the solar panel. Yes. It's, I mean, to first approximation, that's the energy you're going to have to radiate away because it's just turned it to something else,

it becomes thermal rather than photonic. And so a surface, the same size as the surface you're receiving the energy, would be about the radiator. About the right size to radiate it away. You just have to make sure it's not facing another surface that's trying to radiate out. Because otherwise they just, they heat each other. That's all you're doing is.

So we have spun out a company to do this. So my passion for my life is Habitat. I really want to scale humans in space with this curved self-isclosure instruction. By the way, everybody, MIT spawns out companies, just so, you know, that's what that's... So we get taught to do. That's what they do. She just said it casually, that's a thing. Nice.

That's good. That's a thing. Yeah, it's called... Sweetie, are pregnant again. Oh, dear. Got another company idea. This one goes Fortune 500. So we spun out rendezvous robotics.

They're going to focus on what we call the beachhead markets, so big, massive, of flat things in space, like solar panels, radiators, AI data centers, maybe big communication antennas to get really big apertures much bigger than you could have gotten, again, having to squeeze it up into a rocket. So Rondeu Robotics does that, and then I'm going to keep the nonprofit to do future work on space stations for human spaceflight. And where does your money come from? For which piece?

You're not-for-profit. Not-for-profit is NASA grants, a little bit of corporate sponsorship, and then philanthropy from visionaries who want to see a vision of space that is more inclusive. So rich people that just want to live the future. All two of them. Both of them. I don't get any money from those two. I think it's more that we, and I used to be really obsessed with science fiction when I was younger.

I really did want to go live on Mars and elsewhere. Someday I think that'd be amazing for humanity. But I changed my focus in Orrealee Institute right around the time of the beginning of the pandemic to say, I actually want to work on space infrastructure that is good for life on Earth. So our donors are people who are happy to support space, but they want it to support life on Earth. They want it to be

off-worlding the AI data center so that you're not having that burden of the heat that's generated inside of a water vapor atmosphere, right? That's why they're excited to support Aurelia. It's a little bit different than the other typical people that you think about in the space industry. Well, the whole Mars thing, I mean,

I'm sorry, I've never said this publicly, but get over yourself. I mean, let's be honest here. You don't want to go? No, I don't want to go, and I don't think anybody else wants to really go, and it doesn't really make sense. Antarctica is warmer and wetter than Mars, and no one is lining up to build condos in Antarctica.

Yeah, right. There's no Miles Tourist Board. I think the whole Mars thing comes from the fact that ever since somewhere around, you know, the turn of the last century, we developed this fascination and we were enamored of Mars and it's never left us. It's just never left us.

There's Percival Lowell. Yeah, it's him. And the canals, he's a Mars fanatic. And he wrote a book called Mars. Then he wrote a book called Mars as an abode of life. Then he wrote another book called Mars and its canals. And everyone is thinking his life on Mars. And then H.G. Wells heard about this.

Then he wrote War the World. With Martians coming and sucking our brains out. Right. We were off with the races at that point. I'm with you guys on this. I think humans should live in space stations that can spin. Why go to another gravity well? That's only one-third our gravity well,

which means we're not going to do well. We're not even sure a woman can bring a baby to term in one-third G. So talk about Mars civilization. It's more like Mars outpost. So going back to off-world industry, is there a way, is there any thought being put towards harnessing solar power to redirect it back to Earth

and make it more a universal, This is my favorite topic. I think AI data centers has captured a lot of people's attention recently. It's the now. But I think a problem that really doesn't need solvians. China already has a plan to do that.

They do. A big flashlight in the sky. Yeah, yeah. Well, no, it's microwaves to be in town. There are a bunch of U.S.-based commercial companies who are now trying to compete and beat China to it. So we've known since the 70s that we could do this with microwaves. Just a little scary to think about,

so the way it works is you take the energy from the solar panels in orbit, way more efficient because you're getting raw, unfiltered sunlight. And you can do it 24-7. And you can do it 24-7. So you collimate, you gather this energy up, you convert it into microwaves. Not trivial, but you can do it, and you beam it down. But the problem with that is it's very Austin Powers. Yeah.

Lights is in spikes. First of all, here's the problem with that. That's called a weapon. As I thought he has a microwave. Yeah. Yeah. The plane actually goes off course. Oh, yeah.

Zap. Don't cross that screen. Just a puff of them. So the company that we work with, Overview Energy, is a flashlight from orbit. So they're doing it with IR. The amazing thing about infrared. Infrared. The amazing thing about that is you can shine it on existing PV arrays on photovoltaic cells, solar panels.

So you don't have to build new infrastructure. Oh, it's a transfer of photons to collectors here on Earth. So you take the raw... Wait, hold on. But you still can't get through clouds. Yes. So it's not... And this is the trade-off.

You can have perfect, pure... efficiency with microwave, or you can do IR, I think it's probably the only way regulatory-wise on the Earth to get this approved. But then you do, you get attenuated by water vapor. So you have to do it on a clear sky day. Or you do it to a place in Australia or Arizona. Or desert. Any desert. And then you put it out of desert.

A lot of desert. A lot of desert. A lot of desert. Then again, you've got a logistical transference from where you capture. And interestingly, to connect the two topics, AI data centers and space-based solar power, this company overview energy that we work. with, they just signed a deal with meta to power meta. Oh, God. Damn!

Data centers. So sorry. Chuck has to blow a gasket once per episode. Not the O-rings. We're a little sensitive in the space industry. The blow a gasket, not an O-ring. The meta deal is going to have space-based solar power, power the AI data centers on the ground.

So they're not trying to do it in space, which solves some of those challenges we were talking about earlier, radiation, how do you handle the heat? They're going to have the AI data center on the ground but use 24-7 clean energy to power it. So there's not microwaves that's going to zap anything like all the satellites and space junk that's just flying around Earth. Yeah, yeah, it's not microwaves. The cross-section of the space station, last I checked, rivals that of a football field when you include all the solar panels and the radiators and everything. You want to make something bigger than that.

Yes. That makes you that much more susceptible to the flying wellendas of space junk. Damn. Okay? And space junk moving 18,000 miles an hour. And you're just this billowy sale to collect it all, it seems. So how do you square your ambitions for large space architecture with the actual state of space junk? And space debris.

And not to mention at this moment, last I checked, the 14,000 SpaceX satellites. Right, and ever increase in count. Yes. For the really massive deployments, like those... Starlink satellites. Starlink satellites, yeah. For the really massive deployments

that Rondevo robotics would do, our startup that's trying to do big, you know, surface area solar panels for AI data center in space or something. The benefit of it being modular is if you know where the debris is coming from, you can pop a few tiles out of the way and you can pass through it.

And that's the benefit of it not being a monolithic architecture. Wow. decentralized architecture. The better answer is... Or that'd be a lot of work. Clean up the debris. The much better answer is...

How about that? Invest in remediation. Because you've only got to get it wrong once. No, no, no. Moving those tiles. Oh, no, no, no. Here's what you do. Okay.

No, you don't pop the tile and let it pass through. What good is that? Let it hit the tile. Then it'll absorb the debris. And then you just swap a new tile in. And then you take that tile in frisbee it back down to earth so it burns up. And then you're good. Yeah.

Okay, I saw that problem. Or make the whole thing out of rubber. Like flubber This is great We'll just combine the beachhead use case With the debris remediation all in one There you go Popam on pop on

No but you're hoping for small size debris I have to tell you that's not a bad idea For space clean up Well most space debris is small Right it's like size of marble It's very small Yeah NASA has a It's a whole website

Yeah Yeah you can track There is actually great progress being made In trying to clean it up There's ideas coming out of ESA, European Space Agency. There's some companies trying to do Pac-Man for space. I remember what that thing sounds like. Not we about you.

What a computer game on? Let me hear again. Let me hear it again. Stop. Perfect. Stop. If you can fly through a more, you know, relatively more crowded part of orbit with some big capture area, then you can eventually amass enough mass that you will.

will aggregate and then burn up in the entry. And then burn up in the app. Oh, that's great. Yeah. So there's some serious efforts to try to remediate the debris problem and not just solve around. Oh, so it's a self-destructing object. You collect and then destroy with no problem. Right, because as you're collecting, I don't know if it's the mass so much as it'll slow it

down. It's the drag. Yeah, yeah. Mass and then, you're right, I should say the envelope of this thing to get more drag from the upper edges of the atmosphere. Right, exactly. Plus, anything that hits it head on, it'll slow down, drops it to a lower order. And then it's a runaway.

I love it. It's a self-cleaning vacuum. That's what it is. Wow. That's nice. All right, so what we've discussed so far is the International Space Station with life expectancy about four or five years from now. What's the timeline for what we're discussing with you about space balls, space vacuums?

He wants to know when your company's going public. Maybe. Rendezvous Robotics is doing a priced seed round right now, so a very early stage company. The Habitat work. How much do you need? Yeah, we'd be honored. Oh my God.

The Habitat Company, or not sorry, the Habitat Research within the nonprofit, we think that we want to be able to attach our self-assembling module to whatever the first commercial space station replacement is. They have to have a replacement for the ISS by the time they burn it up from a national security perspective,

we're not going to agree to have no American or Western world space station in orbit. So we're trying to be ready for 2032. Where there's a will, there's a way, and there's a will to make that. There's not a will to make that happen. There's a will. That's the biggest will out there. That's exactly right.

And so we want to be ready for that 2031, 2032 time frame when the commercial space station is up, the Phoenix from the ashes. We want to attach to that. So I've been working on this for a decade. I started my PhD in 2016. So it's not like I could just turn this project on and have it be feasible in five years, but 15 years.

Yeah. The 10 years we've already done, five more years, get ready to attach a proof of concept habitat, self-assembling habitat is the goal. Rendezvous robotics for the beachhead market stuff, they have to show that they can do customer traction in 2027, 2028, 29. They don't get to have the pleasure that I have

of doing longer-term research. They have to really get commercial. Have you had any low-earth trials, low-th orbit trials? Yes. And the success of? We've done two successful Lower Earth Orbit trials inside of the International Space Station, where the tiles, we actually see them autonomously dance. They do this little pirouette in orbit to come together and dock and form the structure.

Wow. The Rondiw of Robotics, our company, is going to do the first ever in Leo, Lower Earth Orbit, not inside of the ISS, but in free space, demo of much bigger, like tiles bigger than the size of this table, about five feet on edge lane next year in 2027. I got a physics question. Yes. To bring tiles together. Yes.

Aren't they kind of attached to each other on launch? You have to separate them in order to reassemble them in a different way? What we think we're going to do is pack them, so the magnets are on the edges of the hexagons and the pentagons. We're going to pack them flat like pringles in a can. And what will happen is my Ph.D., I studied, let them all out in one big swarm and see if we can get them all to come together. It's too complicated, but it worked in simulation. What we're going to do for the company is a tile comes out of the stack, it moves over, another tile immediately comes up and docs.

They're going to move out, and they will build a spiral like the reverse of peeling in orange. And it's not going to be as complicated as 32 tiles that form a soccer ball floating around in a big orb. Trying to find each other. Which is what I did for my PhD to prove the harder problem of how could you do a big messy stochastic system, semi-random system. We're just going to, for the company, do very pragmatic, connected. scale out. There's a kids story. I think it's called... To sponsor it.

Yes, or Lego. I think it's called connectics. Which are... I played with those. Magnetles. Magnetiles. Magnetiles. Well, there are segments and their balls. So that the segment has a concave,

a concave surface that can attach onto a ball so that the angle can be anything. You can make all of the polyhedra with it. Because my wife is a physicist. We wanted to make sure that All of their toys were probes of laws of physics.

Oh, I love that. And so this magnetic connection kit. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I've been told that my generation was Lego, so I would say Legos with magnets, but apparently magnet tiles are the new thing for kids now, which are basically flat panels with magnets on their edges. So I wish I had come up with that toy.

I kind of did, but for the whole world. Well, we have to have you back. You live now in New York City. I live now in New York City. Well, welcome to my office here at the Hayden's. planetarium. And you came when you were a kid? I did. I came when I was a Girl Scout in 2002 or 2003 to do a museum overnight. So we slept in your planetarium.

In the planetarium or in the under the whale? Right outside. Yeah, right outside under the whale. But we basically got to do a tour of the planetarium. And that is what started my obsession with space. So it's kind of crazy to come back. I was director. Wow. Yeah. Coming here was like a salmon swimming upstream. Came back. Coming back home. Brad Hall began. So it's an honor, Neil.

Thank you. Yeah. We will totally have to get you back. Yeah. And tell us where to put money. Real. How far along are we? How's that baby coming?

What trimester? What trimester? Where's the due date on the baby? Chuck, I will keep you posted. I promise. All right. So, this has been another installment. Start Talk, special edition.

This one felt extra special, though. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right, again, Ariel, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Being on StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking at it.