The Current - Could space be the next daily commute?

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Ariel Ekblaw is a space architect looking to solve the problems of life on Earth and beyond. Hear how her designs for a new space habitat could replace the International Space Station, a reality check on data centres in space, and how low orbit manufacturing could hold the key to curing blindness. This is not science fiction, but is the next step in the space race. 

The nation is watching Alberta, and we know it. I'm Kathleen Petty, host of West of Center. Every week I speak with the people shaping Alberta politics from pipelines to separation to help you understand what's going on here and why it matters to the entire country. Pull up a chair and join me, West of Center. Find us and follow wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast.

Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. I snuck a peek out the window, and I saw the earth, and it was just the Pacific Ocean. And it was just all ocean, and it was amazing to see. We were still pretty low at that point. And then not long after I saw Australia, it was so red. And I turned to read, I said, that's Australia, question mark. And he's like, yeah, that's Australia. And that's when I started to slowly comprehend, wow, I'm.

actually flying around our planet right now. That's Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hanson. On this program, right after he'd returned to Earth from the Artemis II mission, that voyage was the furthest into outer space that a human has ever been. Missions like Artemis, the growth of private space companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX, and new visions of worlds beyond our own, thanks to the James Webb Telescope, have a lot of people talking and dreaming once again about human potential beyond our world. One of those people is Ariel Ekblah.

She is a space architect and the founder and CEO of Aurelia Institute and is shaping what space can offer us here on Earth and beyond. And she joins us now. Ariel Ekblah, good morning. Hi, great to be here. Good to have you here. You call yourself a space architect. What does that mean?

It means that we with my team at Aurelia Institute are working on the next generation of in-space infrastructure, really large-scale scale. space structures in orbit that can profoundly democratize access to how many humans get to go be up there and experience space. How did you fall into this life, into that world? My parents are both pilots, which was very unusual for my parents' generation. My dad was an 8-10 fighter pilot. My mom was one of the first women to ever fly in the U.S. Air Force.

And then when I was an undergrad, I had this amazing opportunity to do a zero-gravity flight through NASA, I was just completely hooked afterwards. This experience of floating in zero gravity is incredibly sublime. That started me on my career path of thinking about how different it is to design for life in a zero-g environment compared to the normal gravity environment that we have here on Earth. Those zero-gravity flights, I mean, they call them the vomit comet, right? Like you fly up and it's like, can you describe for people like what you're doing, but also what it's like when in those brief periods, you are experiencing zero gravity.

It basically does what you want a plane never to do. It pitches really steeply upwards at 45 degrees, and then the plane noses over, flies towards the ground at about 45 degrees. And that creates what's called a parabolic arc. It's basically like the curve of a roller coaster, and then imagine that plane going up and down like that, about 30 or 40 times in the sky. So it really is like a roller coaster in the sky. And when you're at the top of those arcs, you are floating for about maybe 20 seconds, 25 seconds, if the pilots are really good. And the way that that works is you're essentially in free fall in the plane while the plane is

falling. And that's why you're experiencing that sense of weightlessness. Just the last point on that. I mean, you said that that was a key moment in you figuring out that this was a path you wanted to be on. What did you learn in those moments? This is why what we do now at Aurelia, we bring 25, 50 people every year on these zero G flights because you build this incredible intuition for how different your experience of the world can be when you're floating. And instead of, you know, we think we live in 3D as humans, but we really only live in 2D. We only ever interact on the X, Y plane of the floor that we're walking on. wherever we are. Imagine if you spent as much time up in the ceiling area of every room that you're in

as you do on the floor. And that's what it's like being in zero G is you realize there's no distinction between ceiling floors and walls. You're just in this three-dimensional space that you're able to fully occupy. And as a space architect, that was incredibly inspiring to me to think about how we can design new experiences, do science differently. for the benefit of life on Earth, all of these different really amazing things that are unlocked when that environment is so different. Just describe, and we'll get into some of the specifics, but broadly describe what it is that you're doing in designing how we might live in space.

We think about how do you actually construct the building itself in space, which is not trivial. The way that we've been doing it for decades is you pre-build these buildings. They're typically pretty small, cylindrical pressure cylinders made out of metal. that are on the ground and then you have to squeeze them into a rocket and get them up to space. What we're doing at Aurelia Institute is this idea of self-assembly. So instead of prefabricating a module on the ground and then it can only ever be as big as your biggest rocket, we take an approach that's more like Legos. We build interesting components, modular pieces, stack them flat in a rocket so you can get a bunch

of them very kind of efficiently packed to get up to space. And then once they're in space, the tiles, you know, are able to float and self-assemble into something way bigger than the rocket that took it up there. And we call this technology Tesserae. And then the second part is so fun. It's the what does life look like inside of that shell. And how do we make it look a little different than, say, the International Space Station, where I think a lot of people look at images of the space station and say, okay, wow, that's really impressive. But holy cow, there's a lot of. wires and scientific stuff, you know, just kind of bursting from the seams, could we design an

environment that looks more welcoming and is also safe and fun and delightful for a much broader swath of humanity? So that's interior design, algae sting, glass windows, inflatable couches, you know, like all of this really cool sci-fi interior design for the future of life and space. You've compared this to Lego. So what would you build with the space Lego? Just describe some of the things, and we can get to the space station piece, but what would you build with this technology? So even before we get to space stations, which, you know, are probably a little bit further out, right away, rendezvous robotics, our spin-out company is building and preparing to design things like really large solar panel arrays in orbit. So imagine a solar panel

system that's the size of a football field. You're never going to be able to squeeze all of that up into one rocket launch, but you could have a bunch of individual panels that go up and kind of like a drone swarm. Lots of tiles floating in unison coming to dock together to form something really grand. But my life's passion is really the space architecture piece. And so one of the main shapes that we're targeting with these Tesserae tiles with these space Legos is to make a Bucky ball, which is basically a glorified soccer ball. So it's penitial. and hexagons, and it forms a sphere-like shape. So you'd actually be getting to live inside of this really big, spacious ball.

How far are we from the Buckey Bowl? We are really racing right now to be able to be part of the solution that replaces the International Space Station. Of course, the U.S. and Canada have worked together so beautifully over many years now, Canada contributing the Canada arm and all of this amazing success of the international. space station for the last 20 plus years, but that station is getting decommissioned in 2030, 2031, and we really want to be able to have the Bucky Ball module that we are designing be part of one of the commercial space stations that's going to come online in the next fortified years to

replace the ISS. This is wild to think about it, the idea of building something at that scale in space, not having to send it, not having to send it up in a tube or something like that. It excites me every day. And I think for listeners that are tuning in today, if you have kids that are, you know, young millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, they could very well have a career where they commute to space for work. So it may not be nine to five every day. That would be a little bit silly right away. But it could be in the same way that scientists now commute to Antarctica, go regularly to Spalbard in the Arctic. You know, people have jobs on oil rigs where you go for three months on, come home for three months. that is about to be the near future that we're going to be experiencing as we really scale up space architecture and just the sheer real estate that exists in orbit.

And there's all kinds of cool things we can do once we're there. I think a lot of people will hear that and they'll think, what are you talking about that we would commute to space? But one of the things you said in a speech that I was listening to was that, and maybe this explains it to some degree. We tend to think of space as being really far away. I mean, you go to outer space, that's a long way. But your suggestion was that it's actually not as far as we think, right? It's so close. I know if your listeners are, you know, listening on the, say, the east coast of Canada,

they are closer to space than they are to Vancouver. Space where the International Space Station orbits is only 250 miles up, straight up. So at any time, you are way closer to space than you are to many other parts of a really vast country like Canada. And people also sometimes wonder, okay, well, that's well and good. It's closer than I realized. But what's the point? Why would I be commuting or why would my kids be commuting to space? People tend to think of space as kind of an emerging technology sector that may or may not be relevant to their lives today. I think a better way to think about it is it's just a domain.

It's the little cocoon right around Earth that we call low Earth orbit. And all of the different businesses that have a role in day-to-day life on Earth will have a role in space. So let's use space technology in low Earth orbit for the good of life on Earth and give people a chance to really have democratized access to that economic opportunity too. The cost to get to space used to be tens of thousands of U.S. dollars per kilogram. Today, it's about 1,500 U.S. dollars per kilogram. And with Starship coming online, it's expected to be under $200 a kilogram. That is like FedEx or a DHS. If you can ship cargo on the ground around the world or ocean freight, you can ship it to space.

And that is just really remarkable. And that economic change is driving a huge burgeoning growth of the space economy. And this is a bit of a loaded word, but do you worry about colonizing space? And do you worry about, again, turning that domain, if you want to call it that, turning space over to individual companies, private companies, some of whom I don't know who I would be talking about, but some of whom are run by rather controversial figures. And I don't know that people would be comfortable broadly with that. How do you think about that? How do you think about the control of space? So much of science fiction is about space colonization. And yes, I'm a total

sci-fi nerd. I grew up reading science fiction. I love it. Someday, I think humanity will want to be able to do that. We'll want to be able to extend our reach as a species. I think there's a beauty in that. But maybe before we do that, we ought to maybe earn our right as a species to go and expand further by showing that we can take really good care of our home planet first. How are we using space technology in the next five decades, right? How are we using that for the good of life on Earth? What kind of biotech can you only uniquely do when you're floating? Or what kind of energy can you. you harness through space-based solar power and then beam it to Earth like a flashlight, even at night, and fundamentally solve the intermittency problem for solar power on Earth.

These are the types of investments in the space industry that we are really focused on because we want to show humanity, let's use space for the public good. And then I think we earn our right as a species going forward to then think about, you know, life on Mars in the future. there is a lot of really great work happening around the moon. And I think that there is a really compelling case for humanity to practice our ability to go live on other planets by investing in a sustainable lunar base in this coming decade. But how do you ensure that that remains in our hands, that it's not in the hands of private companies whose interest may well be to serve humanity, but really their interest is to make money and to control things? I think it's going to be a hybrid future.

So we're going to see a lot of action through commercial companies, but that's also starting to diversify, which I think is really important. So there's going to be a healthier and bigger crop of space companies. And then the compromises, the government still certainly in the U.S. and Canada and in Europe and Japan as well, has really good regulatory frameworks for low Earth orbit. Things like the FAA in the U.S. controlling launch. Where it gets a little bit more complicated is the moon and beyond where we don't have as much. much regulation. We don't have as much international law that's settled. And I think you're raising a really great point, which is there is a lot of design, of policy design that needs to happen to make sure that we don't get, you know, exploitative mill town like architectures on the moon where

it's just for-profit companies that are entirely determining that ecosystem. But I think a lot of people are very involved right now in kind of space law, space policy to make sure that we are charting an open and fair and equitable future for humanity as best we can. Could I just ask you just a question about low earth orbit? And it's just because we've had a number of conversations on this program with folks like Chris Hadfield and others who've been up there, but other companies that are trying to, yeah, he's fabulous and has lots to say about this, just about the amount of stuff that's in low Earth orbit already.

And I mean, Elon Musk continues to launch, you know, Starlink satellites. There's a lot of other things that are floating around. and people are worried about collision. Do you worry that what you're talking about will just put more, not saying you're building a space chunk, but more things into that orbit that could crash into each other, that could create problems down the line?

Before we launch things to space, we now, in the U.S., we're bound by the FAA's rulemaking that basically says, before you launch anything new to space, you have to be able to prove that it has a credible de-orbit plan. So that that means basically at the end of life of your spacecraft or your satellite,

that you have proved that it will completely burn up on reentry or for the very rare, you know, much, much bigger things like the International Space Station, when that gets decommissioned, NASA and Canada and the nations that are collaborating, will have a plan for how that settles down back to Earth and the ocean in like a very controlled and very safe way, which NASA has done before. there was an era where we were launching really nilly ways, you know, too many objects into space without that requirement that we know how to handle the existing debris. But importantly, there's also some efforts to do remediation around ways to go through some of the more crowded orbits and clean up that debris and either recycle it or, you know, get a big enough kind of agglomeration of it that then it can it can go burn up on reentry. The nation is watching Alberta, and we know it.

I'm Kathleen Petty, host of West of Center. Every week I speak with the people shaping Alberta politics from pipelines to separation to help you understand what's going on here and why it matters to the entire country. Pull up a chair and join me, West of Center. Find us and follow wherever you get your podcasts. Can I ask you, Just about some of the specific ideas.

You've hinted at some of them, but some of the big ideas around what we might do in space. There's a whole argument down here on Earth about data centers and where they should go, where they shouldn't go. People don't want them in their neighborhoods. They're worried about what they will mean for environmental footprints and what have you. Is there the possibility to build these data centers in space? And if so, what would that mean?

The long and the short of it is, it is a very complicated endeavor. It's not a slam dunk to be able to put AI data centers in orbit, but it is feasible. It just requires a lot of engineering challenges, basically, to be overcome. So one example is people think, ooh, space is really cold. Maybe that's a great place to put servers and computing infrastructure because they're so hot and they need to get cooled down. That is a misnomer. When you're in space, there's no convection. So you're actually really going to struggle to get rid of the heat from those electronics.

and what you're going to have to do is radiate that heat away. But we have developed over decades, you know, the technology to be able to do radiative heat transfers. So we'll do that for the AI data centers. There's questions about radiation. There's question about if you want to replace your chips every six months because Intel or Nvidia are making, you know, new product lines. How do you then service something that is all the way up in space?

Again, these are not insurmountable challenges. They're just challenges. I think one of the promises of figuring out as a society how to do that right is this idea of off-worlding. Not off-worlding the humans, but beginning to off-world the heavy industry that is, you know, making Earth struggle in various ways. Contributing a big carbon footprint to the Earth, which a build-out of AI data centers on the surface of Earth certainly would. This might be humanity's first opportunity to, from the very beginning, off-world the next generation of, you know, heavy infrastructure that we need for growth, but do that responsibly in space.

You know, in the future of the next 50 to 100 years, maybe we should be thinking about taking mining slowly but surely off of the earth. We could be taking chemical byproduct manufacturing or gain of function research off the earth and slowly, gradually, let Earth, you know, kind of recover as a garden plant. which I think would be a wonderful legacy for space technology to be able to offer the humans on this planet. One of the other things that you've talked about are cancer drugs and making cancer drugs that now are delivered through an IV into a shot.

This is so inspiring to me. Merck took their $30 billion cancer drugs. I think a year or two ago it was maybe one of the best selling drugs on the market called K. Truda. and they were able to use research from the space environment to transition the formulation of the drug based on the crystalline pattern in the drug. So basically they're getting more homogenous crystalline patterning, and that allows them to take it from an IV, an injection, an injection, to a subcutaneous shot, like a shot in your arm or something. And for Ketruda, if they're able to then roll that out, that's in a huge quality.

of life improvement for their patients. You know, you'd not happen to go into a hospital setting to get your cancer drug. You're able to maybe do it in an outpatient doctor's office, which is just an amazing story, again, of the benefits of the uniqueness of the space environment from a physics, you know, material science standpoint and biological standpoint that then allows us to have these kind of innovations that profoundly make life better. You know, one of the things that some people will say in listening to this is this sounds really far out and exciting. But we have big wicked problems here on Earth. There are things that we are dealing with climate change among them that are threatening life here. And why are we spending

time and money and energy on space and not here on the planet that we are already living on? How would you address that? I actually think that the answer here has to be a yes and. It's not that we're advocating for massive space budgets. You know, in the U.S., the NASA budget is very modest compared to other government spending. It's because some of these challenges that humanity is going to face in the future of our civilization, they could take decades or hundreds of years to solve. If you're not investing in space technology now, by the time you need it, it is too late. And so this is one of those strategic things as a society.

We need to balance the investment in space technology today with the other really pressing existential needs of other things that need to get funded. A great example is asteroid detection. If we want to be able to detect an asteroid and potentially move it, actually change its trajectory to avoid another dinosaur-like extinction event, that space technology that needs to be developed and practiced right now. I think people have a very fair argument that maybe space tourism or space exploration is a little farther out. But a lot of the technology that we're working on at Aurelia is to help cancer treatments in the next five years. know it's to get Lambda vision through FDA clinical trial so that families with macular degeneration can finally have an answer. And that, I think, is also really worthy of prioritizing in this same moment. Which is why you say that space exploration is not about abandoning Earth, but it's not about

the Elon Musk. We're going to take you all to Mars kind of philosophy, that this is about us here. Yes. For me, space exploration is very much not about abandoning Earth. We shouldn't be thinking of Earth as a plan B. We should be thinking first of what can we build? really cool, large-scale infrastructure with a big impact that can profoundly improve life on Earth. And then as we earn our right as a species, we can go start thinking about space exploration, the moon, and Mars and beyond. So I think it's a hybrid answer. I still want humanity to be able to have that exploration.

I think it's core to our species. But at the same time, yeah, there's a lot of amazing work that's very pragmatic that we can do right away. Last question. And it's just about how you think about this. In addition to studying physics and mathematics, you also studied philosophy, right? How does that shape how you think about space and how you think about the potential and the possibility of the work that you do? It made me a humanist. And I think this is a great gift that you can give to someone who's otherwise going to be a scientist or an engineer for the rest of their life,

is to have a training in philosophy and in humanism because it inspires me to make sure that there is a role. for humans in space exploration. We're in an era where there's so much discussion about what can be done with AI. Can humans be replaced by robots? And I do think that there's just this profound beauty to the style of consciousness that we happen to have. And maybe in the future, we grant some form of silicon consciousness to AI,

but I think that will always be something really beautiful about the way that humans evolved this awareness of our world and of ourselves. and there's just this incredible opportunity in the space industry for us to explore, as they said in Star Trek, the final frontier. And there's a real beauty in that. And so I'm so excited for Aurelia to also be able to support that long-term future for humanity. Our logo is a little chrysalis, a cocoon. And Oralia is an old English word for chrysalis. The idea being that we, humanity are at the cusp of our metamorphosis into a space-faring species. There's a real optimism to the way that you speak about this, and it's fascinating and really,

just really, really, really interesting to hear about the potential that you see in us. Ariel, thank you very much for this. Thank you so much for having me. It was delight to be on the show. Ariel Ekblah is a space architect and the founder and CEO of Aurelia Institute. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC. c.ca slash podcasts.