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- [00:00]
A
Should I build my second home on Mars? And how exactly would I do that? This is Smart girl, Dumb questions. I'm Neymar Raza and today I'm here with Ariel Ekbla, aerospace architect and the co founder of the Aurelia Institute, as well as its CEO. This is a nonprofit that's focused on the potential for space habitats.
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B
Hi Naima, Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
- [00:19]
A
First of all, what the is a space architect? What is a space habitat? And how do I get one?
- [00:24]
B
Yes. So we think about how to make life in space a little more fun and welcoming and safe for, for the next generation of people who are gonna be part of the space industry so that you and I could actually go to space in our lifetime and have somewhere to go that we'd be excited by.
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A
Are you not excited by space right now?
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B
Sadly, the International Space Station, which is the current space station that the government has, is about to get decommissioned.
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A
I know. What does that mean?
- [00:47]
B
Actually it's very dramatic. It's going to die in a fireball in the sky. It's gonna burn up on reentry. We're really good at doing that safely. So it sounds like a crazy thing to say, but that's how most space space debris ultimately becomes absent from orbit, is they get low enough in the atmosphere and it gets heated up in the atmosphere and then it burns up on re entry.
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A
And no one will be inside when this happens?
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B
No one will be inside. Yes and no lives were harmed in the making of this movie.
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A
Smart girl, dumb questions. How many space stations are there right now?
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B
There are two. So there's the International Space Station and there's the Chinese space station Tiangong. And the crazy thing is all of the people that we could possibly fit in orbit right now is 14.
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A
That's the maximum number with both of those.
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B
With both of them. And the SpaceX Dragon capsule. So imagine you have new little astronauts coming up to space. They haven't arrived in the space station yet, but they're in Dragon, all combined Tiangong, the Chinese space station, ISS and Dragon.
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A
14 people, space population 14. Space population 14. Plus a lot of potential aliens we do not know.
- [01:51]
B
Could be. Yes, we don't know. I'm very pro alien, okay. I'm convinced that there must be other life somewhere out in the universe. Universe is so vast.
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A
Just explain how like an International Space Station gets built right now.
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B
So you basically build these aluminum tin cans, very fancy pressure cylinders on the ground and they're monohulls on the ground.
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A
On Earth.
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B
On Earth. Yeah, good clarification. On the ground, on Earth. And then because that's a welded structure, it's physical. You can only fit it in a bigger rocket, which means the rocket, the size of the rocket is your size constraint for how big your room can be, which is kind of wild. And so then you get the International Space Station, which is a lot of little claustrophobic rooms bolted together in space.
- [02:32]
A
Just paint the picture like a bunch of dudes and gals, Dudes and gals. We build these cylinders, and I don't say we, I'm not building any of these. But they build these big cylinders on the ground, on Earth, and they put them into giant rockets and then they launch them up into orbit. And when they get out to orbit, they start connecting them. And when you show pictures of this or when you see pictures of this, they look like gymnasts. They're like dangling. They're like taking spacewalks and they're like dangling on the side of a wing, like trying to attach it to something while in orbit. It's actually wild.
- [03:04]
B
It's so courageous when you think about it. It's a human in an EVA suit with a little thin layer of fabric protecting you from the vacuum of space.
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A
What's an eva?
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B
Getting lost? EVA is extravehicular activity. But, yeah, it's super courageous. It's just kind of craz to imagine that a human is still manually constructing, like we do on Earth, some of the most sophisticated technology known to humankind. Like, there must be an opportunity to add robotics into this or get a little bit more sophisticated because it's so
- [03:32]
A
biologically exhausting to go do this. Even to wear the EVAs, like what happens to your body in space.
- [03:39]
B
You're wearing a really thick suit, and so you're pushing against that material. So it's exactly like you said, super exhausting. It's also tricky for women. A lot of the spacesuits have not been designed for tiny, petite bodies. And so it can be hard to even just move the fingers in the glove. So dexterity is tricky if we're talking about longer term life in space. Like Scott Kelly, who famously spent a year in space, all kinds of things change. So your heart gets a little weaker because you're not having to pump blood against gravity. Your eyeballs change shape. So they go from being, you know, the normal shape that they are, kind of like a little oval, to being slightly more spherical because they're liquid. So you're gonna have that change happen? Yeah, maybe it changes in a good way, but the amazing thing is we know that when you come back down to Earth, most of your systems re acclimate really quickly. And that leads us to think that, you know, if anybody's listening to this podcast and they have kids in your life, your kids could commute to space for work in 15 or 20 years, maybe not nine to five every day.
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A
15 to 20 years. Is this research backed, this number? Yeah, everybody keeps saying everything is like 10 years out. Elon Musk has been projecting, when we're going to space, it's supposed to be tomorrow, yesterday, all the time. All the time. So what tells you it's 15 to 20?
- [04:47]
B
This is a great question. So it's not 10 years, it's a little longer than that. And we think it's because it's the change in price to get to space. The price to get to space was like $50,000 a kilogram.
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A
50,000.
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B
50,000 a kilogram. So really expensive. That was the NASA shuttle era with starship coming online, which is the new SpaceX rocket, is supposed to be $200 a kilogram, which is ridiculous. It's so cheap compared to what it has now.
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A
You said it's supposed to be, but it's not.
- [05:12]
B
It's right now, like Today, it's like $1,500 a kilogram starship is so massive that you can even below the $1,500 a kilogram that it is today, because you're just going to be able to get so much more bulk cargo to space. So the way to think about that is that's like FedEx. If you can ship something, you know, cargo, you can ship it to space. Maybe not the humans, we're a little bit more fragile, but we're starting to see the decrease in price and the increase in adoption the same way that we saw it with commercial aviation, where it started out fancy and you'd get dressed up to fly to go to D.C. to New York, and now it's a much more democratized activity. But what are we going to be
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A
sending up in there?
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B
So space is kind of a sneaky, delightful underpin to all of modern life. So gps, if you use Uber, if you use a modern smartphone that is powered by space satellites, if you appreciate the fact that they tell you when to evacuate from a hurricane, that is weather prediction from satellites. So already there's kind of this infrastructure that's in space that's powering day to day life. What we're excited about at Aurelia is what could you do in space with humans? That you can't do on the ground. And one of our favorite examples is biolo, because it turns out bio is super different when you're floating in orbit than when you have gravity here. And you can do things like manufacture an artificial retina that's super delicate. If you try to do this on the ground, gravity causes it to sag, so you can't make a good one. But you can make a nearly perfect artificial retina in space and then bring it back down so you stabilize it. You don't have to do the implantation or the surgery in space. You bring it down here, and it could potentially cure macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.
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A
And you are invested in it. We should just both. You are invested in the Aurelia foundry.
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B
Yep, exactly.
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A
Which is like your venture arm.
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B
Right. So we have the nonprofit arm that does the research for space habitats. How do you build big, expansive space infrastructure? And then we have the VC arm that says, what kinds of technologies and science and engineering do we want to support in this future? And something like this, where you could literally use space to help cure blindness, I think is one of the best possible ethical uses of space for the benefit of life on earth.
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A
Even when you say, like, oh, 15 to 20 years we'll be commuting to space, I'm like, okay, maybe some space tourism, but like, I don't want to go Monday through Friday at 9am on the shuttle, you know, even if it's cheap. I'm curious, like, what would drive someone to go to space? And I think that question. We have explored that a lot on smart Girl jump questions. We've had episodes with Neil degrasse Tyson where we talk about kind of what's out there in the world. We talk with Bill Nye. We talked to Casey Dreier of the planetary Society. So we've had many articulations of like, why it's been good for humans, humankind to invest in space. I think the idea of, like, you personally as a human who wants to maybe socialize with other humans, not from the hiding out aliens, like, why would you want to go be there more than once as a novelty item is a. Interesting question. And you've said, okay, well, there's a.
- [08:07]
B
There's science. I think maybe there'll be hospitality. So you can imagine Hilton hotels. They've actually already flown doubletree cookies to space.
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A
Doubletree cookies?
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B
Yes. You know the doubletree Hilton brand where you check in and you get like a warm cookie when you check in? No, Hilton has Flown? Yes. Hilton has flown these cookies to basically test whether you can bake a sufficiently up to Hilton level specifications cookie.
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A
Are the cookies good?
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B
I don't know.
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A
I didn't get to be gooey. I feel like I hate when cookies are not gooey.
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B
I should get your list of recommendations and we'll make sure when you arrive in MySpace habitat, we got yours.
- [08:40]
A
Yeah, I don't want to. I'm not trying to double tree. I'm going to come stay at your house because your house looks very cool. Your technology, which we're going to get into, looks like, I don't know, it's like Magna Tiles for aliens. We're going to get to that. But Bill and I talked about one of the amazing things that we could explore. So I asked him what the next breakthrough in science is, and he says this the breakthrough.
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C
The breakthrough will come from the stars.
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B
What?
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C
We will harness fusion on Earth's surface. We will have fusion power plants.
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A
Yes.
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C
When I took physics lo these many hundreds of years ago, fusion was always 40 years in the future. For every year is another. Just wait another 40 years. Yeah, but you said that. Always did say that, but it's 40 more years. Well, now it's closer to 10 or 15, because the great problem with any reasonable traditional fusion reactor has been a magnetic field that can contain a plasma. And the problem has been it's like trying to serve Jell O with chopsticks. It's a difficult problem.
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A
Yes.
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C
But with artificial intelligence, it is very reasonable that you can create a system, a software, a computer that controls a magnetic field, not just reacting to where the plasma gets squirted, like squeezing a balloon, a water balloon or something, but anticipating where the plasma will go, and then you'll be able to contain it. And then you could have fusion in Massachusetts or Northern Virginia in these power plants. And then we'd have unlimited electricity for all humankind eventually.
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A
Can you fact check Bill Nye, our childhood hero? Is that gonna happen?
- [10:27]
B
Absolutely. Childhood hero. I do think Bill Nye's right in that we're about to enter a domain of space tech where we can use space resources to help things like fusion. So there's mining happening on the moon to get Helium 3, which is super rare on Earth, but would be required for certain types of cooling, for fusion and for quantum, and bring that back down. And then Bill's particular point about AI and the future of all kinds of different space research, not just fusion, I think it'll be completely empowering. There's a huge debate right now about AI data centers in space that we can get into.
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A
What is your take on this debate?
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B
It's a.
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A
Or summarize the debate and then get your debate. We talked a little bit with Daniel Jurgen about it.
- [11:04]
B
Should we or should we not put massive infrastructure builds in space to be able to basically have the servers for AI data centers? The pro argument is holy shit, you're in space. You get unfiltered raw sunlight. Amazing. And then also you get the carbon footprint of all of that heat generating electronics off of Earth.
- [11:22]
A
Two people offload it. Yeah.
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B
The challenges are there's radiation in space. They tend to really screw up electronics. When you get a single event upset from a radiation event messing up your bits right. In the computer. There's an issue with access. So if you're upgrading your chips every six months with Nvidia, how are you gonna get all the way to space now, every single time and do all of that?
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A
Neon's my handshake.
- [11:43]
B
Yes. Maybe it will be cheap. 200 bucks. Let's go. But having to modify them for thousands of units in a massive array, not trivial. And then the huge issue is space is not cold in the way that people think it is. And so the idea of putting hot electronics in space. Oh great. Space will keep it cold. Mm mm. Space only has a certain type of heat transfer called radiative, which is really inefficient because there's no air in space. There's no fluid to like circulate and cool things down. So it's actually really difficult to cool these little volcanoes of computers in space. So basically it's a trade off. But it's not surprising that Elon and Bezos are excited about it because they have launch companies. Of course they want to be launching really cool infrastructure. And it is good for humanity to learn how to build ambitious big scale infrastructure in space. And still a dilemma.
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A
It sounds like you do not think it's a good engineering.
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B
I'm on the fence. I'm on the fence.
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A
I think for a lot of us, we think about this discussion of offloading into space as are we being sold a bill of goods? A little bit. And also, are we taking all the bad things on Earth and ruining another planet versus kind of repairing our own behaviors?
- [12:52]
B
That's a great question. I think the jury's still out in a bunch of ways. We love this notion in science fiction, which is off worlding exactly like you're saying, can we take all the heavy industry off of Earth and let Earth become a garden planet and push it elsewhere. If we were gonna move it all to Mars, I would be really worried. Cause Mars has an atmosphere. There might be life on Mars that we don't know about yet. That would be disturbing. But I'm not worried about moving the heavy industry to the moon or to an asteroid belt area or to the vacuum of space. Because there's no water vapor atmosphere that we would be polluting in the way that we really do profoundly with mining, chemical byproduct manufacturing. We pollute a very fragile little liquid water ecosystem here on Earth. Our little blue marble. You can do those same processes in a much more responsible way in the vacuum of space. You just have to figure out the non trivial engineering to make that happen. So it is one of those aims that we would love to support at Aurelia Institute is building the habitat infrastructure and then eventually the automated industrial infrastructure for a future that lets Earth be more focused on keeping Earth healthy.
- [13:53]
A
So when Neil Degrasse Tyson was on, he said this.
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D
I have a way more practical view of the world. Which is every scenario you come up with that can put life on Earth at risk to solve. It seems to me to be easier than terraforming Mars and shipping a billion people. Now suppose we, suppose we trash our environment and we need Earth 2.0. That's not an asteroid.
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A
Yeah. That's us doing it to ourselves.
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D
Peeing in our own bathtub. Right? Okay.
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A
Yeah.
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D
This time pooping in their bathtub.
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C
Right?
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A
Yeah.
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D
Okay. So why not that if we have the power of geoengineering to turn Mars into Earth, then we have the power to turn Earth back into Earth.
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A
Neil's critique is this kind of idea of like we allied responsibility and accountability for our Earth by like projecting all this onto or offloading all of it elsewhere. Do you think that's a fair critique?
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B
I completely agree with Neil. And so the mission of Aurelia is to do space for Earth infrastructure. Space habitats in low Earth orbit, maybe as far out as the moon that are creating things that we need for better life on Earth. Like artificial retinas or cancer drugs like Keytruda that Merck took to space to make better for the patients. It's like amazing set of stories. What I'm less interested in in the near term is using space as an escape hatch for having treated Earth poorly. And like Neil's saying, you know, like having some Earth 2.0. It's preposterous to think that Mars would be an adequate place to move human civilization. Earth is the only planet where we have co evolved As a species, think about how interwoven we are with all of our biological systems, with our little ecosystem here. So Aurelia is very much in line with what Neil's saying there. Let's do space infrastructure and maybe earn our right to be a space faring civilization by using that space tech first for the benefit of life on Earth before we go out further.
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A
And yet you have said that the challenge for doing this is no longer the rockets, it's the real estate.
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B
Yeah, exactly.
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A
It's really real estate and construction. Aliens are just like us.
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B
Aliens are just like us.
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A
It's the same problems. So you have decided to fix this construction real estate problem and you've come up with this technology for doing it, which I jokingly referred to as magniles. Yeah, magnatiles for aliens or for outer space. Is that fair?
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B
Can I take that as our new branding line? Yes, that's very accurate.
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A
When do you think we'll have second homes there? You're talking about commuting in 15 years.
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B
That's a great question. From a luxury standpoint or when people will be able to routinely visit the moon. We're gonna send humans back to the moon by 2030, maybe 20 or 30 years after that. So like 2050, we'll have a sustainable lunar settlement. That might be a year where you could imagine going to the moon for a long weekend or maybe a full week. It takes about three days to get to the moon anyway. So 2050 plus before we'd be thinking about. There's someone who lives on Earth, but they have a little plot of lunar dust that they get to call their own.
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A
But that's all the way up. What you're focused on is this upper. This lower orbit.
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B
Lower Earth orbit.
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A
Lower Earth orbit. And what is the definition of like lower Earth orbit versus. Is it like nautical miles? Like what?
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B
Yeah, yeah, Basically the International Space Station flies at about 250 miles above the surface of the Earth, which is kind of funny when you think about it. There are points on Earth, like Point Nemo, that are more remote from anyone else on Earth than they are from space. So when the astronauts in the space station pass over Point Nemo and you're closer to that point than the Point Nemo people are to other humans on Earth, which is cool.
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A
Where is Point Nemo? I don't even know what this point is.
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B
Point Nemo is this really remote spot in the Pacific Ocean. Okay, so it's like the most remote spot on Earth. How could you be the farthest from any other landmass but you're closer to astronauts when they fly over you.
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A
It's only 250 miles away.
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B
Yeah, yeah, it's 250 miles away. It takes, depending on your orbit, it can take as little as four hours to get there. It can take up to 30 hours if you take a really old school path to get there. And yeah, I mean, it's this domain where it's profound to see the Earth from space. So there's this psychological effect called the overview effect that's really well documented. Even very serious. Military male astronauts, they have been documented to start crying when they see the Earth from space for the first time because they're so profoundly moved by the fragility of what they see, and they're not rewarded by mission control for losing their shit. So it really is very genuine when these men have these reactions. And now, of course, many women have also flown to space, but that's something we'd love to democratize access to. Imagine if more people had that experience of really treasuring Earth and getting to kind of expand our concentric circles of awareness as a species.
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A
A lot of what you talk about is democratizing access to space, making it more accessible. And in some ways like this, what we talked about earlier, this idea of the cost of going to space, going from 50,000 to 1500 per kilogram and then eventually down 200 bucks. If it's gone from 50 grand to 1500, why is it still so expensive? And only, like, wives of really wealthy people and pop princesses, some of whom we've met have gone into this, you know, space world.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Like, why is it so expensive to go there if it's gotten cheaper?
- [19:09]
B
It's still an incredible feat of engineering when you think about it. You're getting inside a tube of metal with a really big fire at the bottom, and you're launching yourself off of the surface of the Earth, hundreds of miles straight up against all of the force of gravity. So part of the cost is the rocket fuel, part of the cost is the rocket itself. SpaceX's huge innovation was to make it reusable. Can you imagine if every time you landed in London, you threw the plane away that you had flown on from New York? It'd be crazy.
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A
Where to share ways I wish sometimes I might see you united okay. Yes.
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B
But imagine if we did that for every flight. That's what we used to do. So that's the big delta that got the price down so low. What still keeps it high compared to just commercial air travel is we need the infrastructure, we need more landing pads, more launch pads. We need more customers to want to go. Right. There has to be a supply and demand curve to make it work.
- [20:01]
A
I feel like some of like the former NSYNC guys wanted to go.
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B
I feel like Justin America Bieber, I think Susan Bieber wants to go. Okay, what's his name? Tom Cruise. They're thinking of filming the next Mission Impossible movie in space with Tom actually floating in zero G. So this is when I say to you I'm a scientist, obviously I'm a little biased. I want the first few things that we built at Aurelia to be science labs. But I think Hollywood's gonna have filming modules. I think that there'll be, you know, hospitality, the Hilton Hotel brand with the doubletree cookies. There's just about to be this incredible proliferation of activity in low Earth orbit in our lifetime.
- [20:35]
A
At what point do you think we'll need outer space congestion pricing?
- [20:38]
B
It's a great question. I think you're ahead of your time because we already need things like this. There's an FAA rule that now basically says anytime you launch something to space, you have to prove mathematically that you can get rid of it because otherwise you're adding to space debris. You're basically congest everybody else's orbit. So we really need things like ESG for outer space. ESG for outer space.
- [20:58]
A
But Elon's into that.
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B
Elon's, Yes, I think Elon Musk, they are into the idea of preserving space for their own future use and something like space congestion traffic pricing. That is a benefit to everybody because it keeps the orbits clear for operation. You can think of it a little bit like urban planning at planetary scale. So you're going to have utilities, you're going to have things that everybody else is competing to get here. In a city it would be electricity and water. In space it's electromagnetic communication bands because there's only so many bands of frequency spectrum that you can communicate on. So there's utilities, arguments that'll happen. There's traffic, there's waste management, all these different things.
- [21:39]
A
We're gonna have like a Con Edison, a Department of Sanitation for outer space. Yeah, Yep.
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B
We'll definitely need those kind of services as this activity builds up, especially if we have a lot of human activity in orbit.
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A
You yourself are not going out into space to do this.
- [21:52]
B
Not yet, but someday I wouldn't be buying some fancy tourist ticket, but I would be going as the attache, as the buddy of someone who is a high net worth individual who might go. And they're starting to realize that for their space tickets, they wanna bring a scientist along. So I actually think fingers crossed, in a couple years, I might get a chance to go myself.
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A
Okay. Interesting.
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B
But I've been on the zero G flights. Did we talk about this before?
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A
No. Zero gravity flights, affectionately known as the Vomit Comet.
- [22:19]
B
I've been on those 14 times.
- [22:20]
A
It was an awe inspiring moment. Being at zero gravity, even inside this flight.
- [22:25]
B
Incredibly sublime.
- [22:26]
A
Did you cry?
- [22:27]
B
Like the astronaut to see space, seeing Earth. But I remember my first time. They actually tell you because it's such a weird feeling for your body to be floating. It's like being in a pool, but with no liquid. They tell you to make a memory because otherwise your body in six months will totally have forgotten what it felt like. So I have this memory of my hair floating up above my head and my feet above my head, which I'm not a gymnast, so, like, there's no other way in my life that I would be doing that. And I have this incredibly sublime memory of the feeling of true weightlessness. But then it's like a roller coaster. So you get these 20 to 30 seconds of beautiful floating and then it goes down and you get a 2G pullout. And you repeat that parabolic arc 30 to 40 times in the sky.
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A
Wow.
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B
So it's like a roller coaster in the sky, which is why it's affectionately known as the Vomit Comet.
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A
And that's why you can't remember anything. It's like a very dizzying experience. Little cliffhanger. We'll be right back. All right, today's sponsor, Dumb Question is from me, Naima Raza. And I'm telling you to subscribe. Follow like, Share this show. Share it with people in your life. Send it to an ex boyfriend who has nothing better to do because he just misses you all the time. Send it to an ex girlfriend who you want to be your future girlfriend again. Send it to your mom or that aunt who has a lot of time and keeps sending you life advice. Because this show is an independent show. I make it every week with a great team. But to keep things running, I really need you guys to help me grow the show. And I so appreciate that you listen, that you watch, that you tune in every week. Please continue to do that. I am forever grateful. Now back to the episode. Okay, so 2050, holiday on the moon. 2040, commuting. Yeah, baby. Kids going commuting for like a field trip.
- [24:08]
B
They play with Magna Tiles. As they grow up, they learn about
- [24:11]
A
the space station they pack some trail mix and they go four hours up
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B
into the lower to the actual MAGNA tiles up in orbit.
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A
Okay. And when they go there, you have this vision that they're going to be hanging out in these space stations that are built with your new technology.
- [24:26]
B
That's the hope.
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A
Okay. And this technology is called tesserae. Tess Ray. And tell us about tesserae.
- [24:32]
B
Yes. So I've been teased by my PhD advisor to never have this tortured of an acronym again. But TESS Ray stands for Tessellated Electromagnetic Space Structures for the Exploration of Reconfigurable Adaptive Environments. And my advisor's basically like, honey, never again.
- [24:48]
A
No one will do it again. Okay, but say it. No one will remember that. Tesserae sounds like Tesserae, a great Latin word.
- [24:54]
B
You should just pretend it is a Latin word.
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A
What does it mean?
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B
Okay. So I went on this project trip when I was in grad school to go clean Roman mosaics. It was a total boondoggle, had nothing to do with my main research. And we got taught that the little glass tiles that make a mosaic are called tesserae. And what are we trying to do? We're taking small tiles that pack flat in a rocket and we're putting them together in orbit to make a mosaic of a big habitat. So I was super inspired by this notion from ancient Roman architecture of tesserae tiles. In these mosaics, I got like the
- [25:26]
A
last letters of it, but the first one tessellated. Tessellated. What is tessellated?
- [25:31]
B
You take tiles like hexagons. In this case, we take hexagons and pentagons and you make a pattern out of them. That's what it means to tessellate something. So for us, it's basically a glorified soccer ball. If you picture a black pentagon with the white hexagons around it. It's also known as a buckyball. I was very inspired by Buckminster Fuller. That is a sphere approximation. So you can launch flat tiles like Pringles in a can or like a PEZ dispenser. You can launch these tiles to orbit. They have little magnets on the edges of the tiles, the edges of the pentagons and the hexagons. Like magnetiles. Exactly like you said. And then because you're floating in space, the tiles come together on their own
- [26:11]
A
and they know how they're supposed to click or like.
- [26:14]
B
Exactly.
- [26:14]
A
Is it like dating? You can only have one. Like there's a perfect match.
- [26:17]
B
That's chemistry.
- [26:19]
A
Or do they just like click into any.
- [26:21]
B
Which piece Polygamy, you can have lots of different papers.
- [26:25]
A
Yeah, they're interchangeable.
- [26:26]
B
They're interchangeable.
- [26:26]
A
Okay.
- [26:27]
B
The window kind of needs to go in a special spot, and the airlock, which is the glorified door, needs to kind of go in a special spot. But other than that, the tiles are interchangeable.
- [26:34]
A
You actually have, like, tested this technology on Earth and sent it to space
- [26:38]
B
twice, thrice and about to go for a fourth time this summer. Yeah.
- [26:44]
A
And how are they assembling themselves, these polygamous magna tiles?
- [26:47]
B
Polygamous magnetiles. Yeah, yeah. So they have these fancy little magnets called electropermanent magnets on their edges. They're permanent magnets, so they're always on, which basically means they just want to draw the tiles together. There's a bunch of sensing and AI built into the tile so that once the tiles dock, they basically say, hey, who are you? Am I supposed to be docked with you? They can communicate. And then they keep doing that over and over until they form an entire ball. Once the ball's formed, that bucky ball, we then have clamps that come out to basically make the pressure airtight. Right. Cause you wanna put air pressure on the inside, which would push out against the vacuum in a second.
- [27:22]
A
I wanna know what you have learned from doing this thrice and almost a four times. And what's gone wrong? Like, what's fucked up? Because I'm sure things have gone wrong so much. What is the weirdest thing that's gone wrong?
- [27:32]
B
Magnets are magnets. They love to stick together even when they're not supposed to. So we've seen that the tiles clump together. They form like this little crystal clump. Instead of a perfect mag charger fitting into your Mac. Exactly how that magnet's supposed to work. So a lot of our design has been figuring out how to design what we call the polarity of the magnets to make it perfect, to make the tiles want to come together exactly like they're supposed to and not be clumping.
- [27:58]
A
Have you lost tiles?
- [27:59]
B
We haven't lost any tiles in free space. We've done all of the tests so far inside the International Space Station.
- [28:05]
A
Okay.
- [28:05]
B
So we're basically incubating and testing and prototyping inside the big, big real estate that's already there. We then want to build something much bigger than the iss. So as we increase the tile size, we're eventually going to have to go outside and we're actually. I've never announced this publicly before, but we're the first time this Summer is when we're finally going to have space grade tiles the size of me, so like 5ft plus and actually fly them free space outside of the International Space Station. So that'll be our fifth mission.
- [28:31]
A
And how expensive are these things?
- [28:33]
B
Oh my gosh, that's a great question. It hasn't been that expensive to test the prototypes because, yeah, the plastics are easy. Yeah, the plastics are easy. And the cost to get to space is cheap. We've been able to do it for like 200k a mission, which is a lot of money for a lot of people, but that is a level of money in the space industry that it's like, oh my God, yes, we can raise a grant, we can raise 200k, we can go do a test mission. I think for this next mission, like the big space grade run, the company that we're working with that we've spun out, called Rendezvous Robotics, they're probably gonna raise like a $15 million seed round, something like that in the next few months. And so that's around the cost that you can imagine is gonna go into that next mission.
- [29:11]
A
If this works, then how quickly would you wanna go be inside of it? Cause one thing to build that and another thing to put a human inside of this thing.
- [29:20]
B
And you're hitting on something that I take really seriously, which is this will be my personal responsibility as a human to decide when I think it's safe to risk another human life in something that I have built.
- [29:30]
A
Especially if it's a member of NSync, like Matt Bass. Bass, NSync are boys, the other Backstreet Boys, right?
- [29:37]
B
Massive responsibility.
- [29:37]
A
Yeah, Big responsibility.
- [29:39]
B
He's like the nice thing we do like him. Yeah, we want to keep him alive. Yeah. All jokes aside, it is like a really serious thing that we think about. So what we'll probably do is we'll self assemble this big ball, we'll put a bunch of air inside of it, we'll start loading in some autonomous science stuff that could happen even without humans. So autonomous robotic science. And then we'll wait for six months and we'll have a bunch of sensors, we'll make sure that there's no air leaks, we'll make sure that the ball is stable, that it's not tumbling through space, basically that we have to keep it pointed in a good way. And when we have six months worth of data, then we will welcome a test pilot. So in the same way that military has test pilots that fly the first time a plane ever flies, we'll have someone like that. Who's an incredibly well trained astronaut, come in and basically certify the structure.
- [30:24]
A
This is a private company?
- [30:25]
B
Yes. Yeah.
- [30:26]
A
Do you get grants from the government, from NASA and stuff?
- [30:29]
B
Yeah, we get grants from NASA. We do corporate sponsorships, philanthropy, and then we are. Aurelia Institute is kind of like the nursery. So we incubate cool tech ideas, but when we feel like they have a commercial product market fit, we spin them out. I think of it kind of like a skyscraper in New York. So there's a fancy architecture design firm, there's a civil engineering firm who makes sure that their drawings are legit and safe. There's a construction company that builds the drawings and then there's like a developer, owner, operator. Right. Who makes money off the building. Aurelia Institute is the space architecture design firm. We're also kind of the civil engineers. The construction company is going to be Rendezvous Robotics. And then what we need is a developer, owner, operator. So who has a commercial interest in an orbital biolab? We think it could be a Pfizer or a Merck or a Novo Nordisk. Merck, for example, has actually already sent novel drug development experiments to space to basically do new types of cancer drugs. So we think a biotech company might be the owner, operator, developer in a sense.
- [31:31]
A
And when they go in and do that, like when Merck sends people in to test this drug that I have not heard of and we're not flacking on this show for sure, but like do they send people up there with it to test it and then do they have to go to the International Space Station or do they go hang out somewhere else?
- [31:45]
B
Yeah, right now they go to the International Space Station. What we're hoping to do with TESS array with these big scaled up self assembled tiles is to make it possible to do more of the research autonomously.
- [31:55]
A
When they're doing that right now, like these private companies are basically like saying, hey, I want to get like one of the 14 bedrooms in the International Space Station. And they're able to do that. And do they pay for that?
- [32:07]
B
So they don't get to send their own humans up. What they do is they send up a boss that's like a microwave. All of their experiment stuff has to fit inside the microwave. It's not an actual microwave, but it's like a box that size. An astronaut, like a NASA astronaut or an ESA astronaut, gets briefed over the phone about what to do and they if it's required, the astronaut executes the experiment. Now that's amazing. It's so Lovely and gracious of them to do that. And you typically pay for their time too. But what we want is, we want to send scientists themselves to space to do their own research.
- [32:37]
A
Okay, but let's stick with what's happening right now for a second. Not what you're gonna build, which is, but I really wanna understand this. So right now I think that there's a sense across this is like bigger than what we've been talking about, but there's a sense in the American culture and in the global culture that everything has become too privatized. Yeah, when you look at people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos yourself, you're all doing things that are great for civilization, et cetera. But it's also taxpayer funded dollars that are going in to subsidize the development of what I know yours is a nonprofit right now with this venture arm that is going to be, I imagine, hugely profitable, but it's going to subsidize someone becoming a trillionaire. And I think there's a question I have which is how are the Europeans doing that versus the Americans? And is everybody equally privatized and capitalistic in outer space or the Europeans more socialist in space too?
- [33:37]
B
That's a great question. The Europeans are more heavily regulated, which I think we see kind of across European tech industry compared to the us but they're also trying to incentivize entrepreneurs and their culture to privatize space. And I think the argument goes something like what follows. NASA and ESA have been spending so much money pumped into low Earth orbit just to keep the ISS alive that they haven't had the resources to go out and do science in the solar system. And at some point it makes sense for the, you know, the cocoon of low Earth orbit to become a commercial domain as we as humans expand outward, as we kind of figure out how to be a space faring species. And that frees up NASA and ESA to go find life on Europa in those weird liquid seas, or see if there's, you know, a way to communicate with Alpha Centauri. It frees up the science based agencies to go do the vanguard of human knowledge. But I think a lot of people are critiquing in the space industry, which is really important for us to address, honestly is why spend money on space? Why are we spending so many taxpayer dollars on space in the face of climate change or other existential threats?
- [34:43]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think we've had that conversation on the show, so we don't need to rehash that like people can go check out the conversation with Bill Nye or with Casey Dreier on that. That's not my question. My question is more like if it's taxpayer money, like, even that Merck example, if there's a dude in outer space who's being paid on the US dimension, and even if that dude or dudette in outer space is, you know, they're paying for an hour of this person's time to do their research for Merck, I'm like, is that a fair exchange? Actually? Like, should the Merck, like, should the US Taxpayer then, by the way, when you need that cancer drug, it's gonna cost, like, a shitload of money, which is gonna be paid to a private insurance company, which is going to be, you know, charged through a private. Like, the whole system feels like. Like it's not helping in some way. The end user. Now, of course, we need breakthroughs, we need innovation. Maybe the government's not gonna have the skills, talent, resourcing, foresight to, like, to develop that. But I do think there's this, like, space, to me, is the extreme version of privatization because it's so inaccessible right now, even as it's getting more accessible in large part because of private companies that are subsidized by taxpayer dollars to make it so. And I think there's like a philosophical question I have, and you studied physics and philosop about, like, how do you actually make this thing more accessible, not just in terms of people being able to go commute there and being people, but, like, how do we make sure that in the year 2080, the, like, real estate of the lower Earth orbit and beyond and the moon, and maybe by then Mars is not terraformed at, like, huge crazy rents that, like, mimic related rentals in Manhattan.
- [36:25]
B
In Manhattan.
- [36:25]
A
You know what I mean?
- [36:26]
B
Yeah. I think you're asking a great question, which is kind of like, what's the philosophy that's gonna seed this next wave of human space travel? Is it purely commercial? Is it just about profit? Are we going to try to preserve maybe the spirit of original NASA, which was kids like my parents. When the moon landing happened, the original moon landing in 1969, they looked up and they thought, oh, in my lifetime, I'll get to go. Like, I'll get to be part of it without having to be rich or without having to have a company to go do it? I think Jared Isaacman, who's the new administrator of NASA, has come out with a really very inspirational new plan for a lunar base that NASA is going to reinsert. Themselves in. And NASA's gonna do it in a way that is for all of American citizens. The extent to which we can get NASA to still collaborate around the globe I think is important. So it really does become for all global citizens and not just American citizens.
- [37:13]
A
In the film project Hail Mary, they have this like global consortium in the book as well. Right. But that doesn't actually exist. There's not like some global convening of all the NASAs. There's a NASA, ESA, China, NASA, whatever it's called.
- [37:25]
B
Because of. Yeah, because of global geopolitics. There's still a lot of butting of heads. Between the different space programs are a few different uniting groups like unusa, which is the Office of Outer Space Affairs. But it typically doesn't get as much collaboration going. There's definitely a need for international collaboration, coordination. But there is a balance that we also want to set within Aurelia. So that's one reason I run a nonprofit and we have the VC Fund to do investments to accelerate. But my passion is the nonprofit to basically say how could we have space be a public utility for the public good and not only be owned by disparate corporate forces that have their own needs? I think we need both. I'm very pro capitalism, but I think that there is an opportunity to set up some structures. I give you an example, our Orbital Biolab, because it's nonprofit funded. Even if we ultimately get Merck or Pfizer or Novo Nordisk to be part of it, we will protect half the volume. It has to be at minimum 51% of the volume for open science, which means it gets published, which means Merck can't have it. Proprietary data only for themselves. There are ways in structure structures like this kind of as we build to make sure that it's try to keep some balance of public general interest and commercial development.
- [38:37]
A
Though of course I find that we're friendly. But at the same time, I think you might end up having a fight with yourself about these things. The two sides of yourself that are invested in the venture capital arm versus the nonprofit arm. Look at OpenAI started as a nonprofit company, became for profit. Now it's controlling stake for the nonprofit and Microsoft and the overall company. And there are real debates that they're real, like philosophical about how to structure, how to structure it about like who the value is for, who merits that value, right? Like, oh, was it really the taxpayer, Was it really all the data that we ingested? Or was it us with our hard work and our LLM? It's like there are a lot of ways that people come to believe that they have more merit in the thing than they originally believed when they set it up as an open society. And I'm not saying it's wrong all the time. I think often that person probably has some right in it. But I do think it's like, is it an unsustainable structure to be part nonprofit, part for profit? How do you think about that? And when will you know as a business leader that you're.
- [39:47]
B
That you're hitting the right balance, that you're pulled in?
- [39:49]
A
Yeah. That you need to delegate something. Maybe you can't do the nonprofit arm because you're gonna do the for profit or vice vers.
- [39:56]
B
I mean, I think one of the big structures don't give up the for
- [39:58]
A
profit because I think it's going to be rich. And I like that for you. I'm going to come visit you in your space. Second home.
- [40:03]
B
I think one of the structural issues with OpenAI is that there was a for profit stake. Right. For our nonprofit. It really is just a nonprofit. It's a separate legal entity from the VC Fund. The reason I think both structures are important because I am pro capitalist is you want to have levers to pull in all of these different strategic parts of society. I graduated from MIT and I looked out in the space industry and I realized that there are technologies that are missing and there are technologies that tend to get funded by the entrenched interests in any industry. I'm a new actor and I basically said I want to be able to empower mission driven good work in the space industry to get funded. So I'm going to raise some capital, I'm going to pull levers for that. And then on the nonprofit side, I want to work on space habitats that would be transformative for human society. There's not an immediate revenue model in that. If I did that as a for profit, I probably wouldn't get. Get the opportunity to do it. So it needs to live in this incubator nursery of a nonprofit. And so I have that lever. And what I'm trying to do is really intentionally like rising tide lifts all boats because I have this vision of how space can benefit humanity. First step is space for earth infrastructure in orbit, like gps, weather satellites, biotech. That's good here. And then step two is off worlding. Get the heavy polluting ship off of earth and into space in a responsible way. In modern day society. I think you need to have the for profit lever and the nonprofit lever to do it. Well, so I think I really resonate with what you're challenging me on, which is how do I maintain that balance as I go forward is very front of mind for me.
- [41:34]
A
Yeah, because at some point, like, you know, like these, you know, these retina things, they're make you rich and then like you're going to become like Nicole
- [41:40]
B
Wagner, the founder, not me, but maybe
- [41:43]
A
partly you through the foundry. Right. Like, I mean you're probably an LP of the fund and so you have a stake there. And at some point we become, we grow up and we become the entrenched interest or the person that's there. But if you, Ariel, had to choose where your heart is and what you want to be spending your time doing, is it in the nonprofit side or is it in the investing vc, commercializing side?
- [42:10]
B
It's definitely in the space architecture research. I'm a scientist. That's my life's passion. The other elements of the ecosystem I'm incredibly excited by. I spend time in, I think that they're parts of the ecosystem. But I wouldn't have started a space fund just purely to do a space fund. I'm starting a space fund with this mission of how do I democratize access to space? How do I get more humans a chance to participate in this really sublime experience of a zero gravity flight? Or even better, the overview effect, which I even myself haven't gotten a chance to do yet. So I think the core of it is that mission driven work and then we have strategic opportunities around that to leverage.
- [42:47]
A
Okay, I like that because you are so passionate about space and building and the kind of engineering aspect of it. If you could build anything at all in space, what would you build? What would it look like? And when can we go there?
- [43:02]
B
I would build a ring world, a rain world, a ring world, like a big ring picture, a big donut around the Earth. It's this amazing concept from science fiction. There's one in Neal Stephenson's Seven Eves, which is a book about women. Really cool sci fi book that inspired a bunch of my PhD. And it's this notion that you can build infrastructure at planetary scale. So it's like a thin ring. It's like if Earth had a Saturn ring. Basically imagine a artificial Saturn ring that humans have built to do research and space tourism and just basically scale up activity, industrial activity around Earth. So if we had a way to do that safely and could turn that on tomorrow, that's what I would build.
- [43:41]
A
If you were to do this dumb question like how far away would that be? That would be fewer than 250 miles.
- [43:47]
B
It might even be a little farther out than 250 miles. This is a great question. No one's ever asked me to pin me down. Okay. Where is your space ring?
- [43:54]
A
Yeah, where is your space ring? How far would it be?
- [43:56]
B
Probably a little further out than the International Space Station. You don't want it to be too further out because the other cool aspect of ringworlds is you could build a space elevator to your ringworld.
- [44:05]
A
So you could like, just from Earth go pop up to a ringworld.
- [44:08]
B
This is another sci fi concept that has captured people's imagination for decades. So, yeah, that would be goal number two is build the ring. And little spaceships go first. And then eventually, can you build a space elevator?
- [44:18]
A
But as the Earth is like rotating.
- [44:20]
B
Yes. The ring can rotate.
- [44:21]
A
The ring will rotate too.
- [44:23]
B
Yeah. So that's why I feel better.
- [44:24]
A
And how will I stay it. How far? I feel like I need like ice skates or something to stay stuck to it.
- [44:28]
B
Yeah.
- [44:28]
A
So, okay, do I need something?
- [44:30]
B
So if you're spinning in a big enough.
- [44:32]
A
I haven't read this book, so I don't know.
- [44:33]
B
Yes, yes. You'll get artificial gravity.
- [44:35]
A
Okay.
- [44:36]
B
So you'll have a little bit of centripetal force. Like if you've ever been on a carnival ride where they like whip you around at the edge of the Gravitron. It's like that, but. But much more graceful and bigger. And so that's the idea. You'd actually have some artificial gravity at the edge of this ring.
- [44:50]
A
Okay, Very fun. And you've also talked about space cathedral.
- [44:54]
B
Yes, this is a goal that I have for myself as an architect. Have you ever walked into a building on Earth and you just get goosebumps? It's so beautiful.
- [45:02]
A
Yeah. All the time.
- [45:02]
B
I was just thinking to myself, oh, my God, I would love to inhabit this space.
- [45:05]
A
Yes. The DMV. The DMV. Most other buildings, never the GmbH. Yes, yes.
- [45:12]
B
What would you do? Or like, imagine floating into something like a space microgravity concert hall, where you get to be truly in the round. Or a space cathedral, where the spire doesn't just go up. Cause it's not just gravity. You could be in a space cathedral. You're in the center and there are spires going out in every direction because you're basically in the middle of a star. These are types of structures you could never build on Earth. You can kind of uniquely build when you're floating. And it's the kind of ambitious, like Monument to humanity that I think would be a worthy longer term aspiration for space architects. We need to start a little practical first.
- [45:49]
A
Are you trying to be a space God?
- [45:51]
B
No.
- [45:51]
A
Try to build a space cathedral?
- [45:53]
B
No, no space cults, just space architecture.
- [45:56]
A
I feel like space is kind of a cult. Okay, I want to do a little bit of a lightning round with you. Okay. What is the park avenue of space
- [46:03]
B
right now? Probably one of the three commercial space stations. So Axiom Vast or Voyager will be the future avenue.
- [46:10]
A
So when you said we had two space stations, you met.
- [46:13]
B
Currently. Currently we're about to have. There's three or four or five other commercial space station companies that are coming on board and they all want to build a mix of science labs and space tourism. So they would probably be the first Park Avenues.
- [46:25]
A
When this space station gets decommissioned, we're just gonna have the Chinese option for a little bit.
- [46:30]
B
The US Is probably not going to let us decommission our current one without having a US domiciled replacement, even if it's no longer a government station, even if it's commercial. So we might extend the lifetime of the ISS even further to make it overlap with the US Commercial space stations that are coming online.
- [46:47]
A
I personally would not go on an extended warranty space station situation, but you know, I'm not an astronaut, but I don't know. Okay, moon, moon base or Mars colony? Moon base, Moon base. Cause it's more, it's closer, it's closer.
- [47:01]
B
There's so much cool stuff you can do. It's kind of a jumping off point. Why go all the way to Mars with human life at colony scale when you haven't even figured out how to have humans live on the moon.
- [47:10]
A
Okay.
- [47:11]
B
The other problem with the Mars colony, and people love to forget this is Mars is one third Earth's gravity. We're not sure that women can bring babies to term in one third G. And there's all this talk about Mars civilization. It might be more like a Mars outpost where you can have humans visit, but they have to go home to have babies. Or a little dystopian.
- [47:30]
A
The planet sounds very handspin till they,
- [47:33]
B
yes, go up into like an artificial gravity habitat while they're pregnant and then they're allowed to return. So like there's all these problems, there's all these challenges with really having a civilization on Mars.
- [47:42]
A
Elon Musk's contributions to space. Net positive, net complicated.
- [47:47]
B
Net positive for space. That's a well phrased question for the world space. I think he is still net positive for the world. That's my personal take.
- [47:54]
A
Best space movie ever made. Mm.
- [47:57]
B
I have been told it's Hail Mary, which I haven't seen yet. Before that. 2001 Space Odyssey.
- [48:03]
A
2001 Space Odyssey.
- [48:04]
B
Oldie but goodie.
- [48:05]
A
What's the worst space movie that Neil DeGrasse Tyson did this. He had a bunch of a litany of complaints against bad space. His critiques of what wouldn't happen. Really.
- [48:15]
B
There are some really corny dunes before Dennis Villeneuve. New Dune, which I'm obsessed with. I love this. Like, it's like Star wars, like space opera, space epic. There's some really corny dunes out there.
- [48:28]
A
Okay, what is the movie?
- [48:31]
B
Yes.
- [48:32]
A
Would Sandra Bullock survive in real life?
- [48:34]
B
Yes.
- [48:35]
A
Okay. Armageddon, the movie. Would those guys have stopped it?
- [48:39]
B
Yes, they would have stopped the asteroid hitting the retro. Bruce Willis. Yes. We actually have tech, thanks to Obama, who did this. Well, it changed kind of in the Obama administration, but there's an asteroid redirect, Miss. That was designed by NASA. And so, yeah, we maybe have the tech to actually pull off Armageddon.
- [48:55]
A
Buck, marry, kill. NASA, SpaceX or Blue Origin?
- [49:00]
B
Mary SpaceX. Fuck NASA.
- [49:01]
A
Wow. Really? Poor Jeff Bezos.
- [49:04]
B
I'm actually a big fan of Blue, but you can make me pick.
- [49:06]
A
Yeah, okay. But Mary SpaceX. Yeah, okay. Okay.
- [49:11]
B
You're like, you don't approve of my marriage, but, like, eventually, you know, like, give me a chance to re. Give you these answers in 10 years and then I'll update mine.
- [49:20]
A
What is like when you tell people that you're a space architect? And I love that you just said elegant because that's like the most architectural term ever. I just imagined you coming, like, before I met you. We met last year or actually earlier this year.
- [49:31]
B
Earlier this year.
- [49:31]
A
We met earlier this year. It seems like a while ago, but before I met you, I imagined you in a turtleneck. Like, I don't know, like some Steve
- [49:38]
B
Jobs of outer black turtleneck. Today I was like, don't do it,
- [49:41]
A
don't do it, don't do it.
- [49:42]
B
Wear some color.
- [49:43]
A
Yeah, I don't want to do that. But like a space architect, do you feel like you have, like, a taste to what you're building?
- [49:50]
B
I definitely have an aesthetic. It's an organic aesthetic. We're trying to build spaceships that look like things from the ocean. Because when you're in the sea, you're floating, you're buoyant. And so I think that there's a certain beauty to honoring creatures from Earth by making our space faring society Kind of recall some of our earthly origins. Which actually to give some credit to Blue Origin is also, also the idea behind their name, that we are of Blue Origin. So my aesthetic is mainly organic and
- [50:18]
A
even the design for these Magna tiles is a little bit, I'm gonna just call it that for terrestrial.
- [50:23]
B
I love it.
- [50:23]
A
Yes. But it really came from nature.
- [50:26]
B
Exactly. Yeah. And how proteins and DNA self assemble in our bodies. That was the direct inspiration for Tess Ray self assembling algorithm.
- [50:34]
A
Yeah. How much will one of these things cost for a person to buy? You're saying it's $200,000 to, to kind of right now go and test it and prototype into space. And that's like one buckyball maybe that you're sending in a tiny one.
- [50:48]
B
Yeah. I mean to actually like something that could put a human in.
- [50:51]
A
Yeah. Like. Or a family.
- [50:52]
B
Or a family.
- [50:53]
A
Yeah.
- [50:54]
B
The first one that we're gonna do is probably the most expensive one. Cause then once you figure out how to do it, you can improve the cost curve from there. But probably like 400 or $500 million, which is a lot. It's a about the same price that like a Pfizer or a Merck would pay to build an R and D facility on Earth. The reason it's not billions of dollars is that we're going to have these other commercial space stations that already exist in orbit and we get to attach our cool little self assembling module to them.
- [51:22]
A
I mean, this is a really dumb question, but like will it become darker on Earth when all the orbit is covered?
- [51:26]
B
Oh, that's a great question. We do not want to cover the orbits. Luckily, space is insanely vast. And so when you see those diagrams of all the space debris, the size of the dot, like literally the size of a period on a piece of paper to the scale of the orbit that it's drawn in is so off. There's so, so, so much more space in space than you think. The debris problem that you might have heard about, like there is just a lot of trash that's up there that we need to clean up.
- [51:51]
A
Where's that trash coming from? We're sending it there.
- [51:53]
B
Yeah, we're sending it there. Over the last, you know, several decades of the space industry, when countries, and they're not supposed to do this anymore, but when countries want to demonstrate that they become space, space powerful, they will launch a rocket basically or like a missile and they will blow up one of their own satellites to prove to everybody else, I could blow up yours. So I just blew up mine to show you. Oh yeah, that demonstrates capability but it puts an ungodly amount of debate psychological
- [52:18]
A
assessment of a person who does that kind of thing.
- [52:21]
B
Well, entire nation states like China and Russia are still doing it sadly. But in general we now have laws to say you're not supposed to do that because it contributes so much tiny, sharp, sharp ballistic debris.
- [52:31]
A
It's a big problem.
- [52:31]
B
Exactly. There's amazing recommendations mostly out of esa, European Space Agency is taking really good seriousness of purpose here to do something like a Pac man where the Pac man will come through orbit and eat up the space trash. Which basically means get all the space trash so it sticks together, so it gets heavy and then it will burn up on reentry.
- [52:50]
A
Oh wow.
- [52:51]
B
So amazing. And there's like nets and all these other different suggestions for how to handle it.
- [52:55]
A
Does it also have like a special bead where it eats it and gets super fast and it can kill all the bad people?
- [53:00]
B
We should give them some intel or like some recommendations that it needs to have a mode. It needs to have like a badass.
- [53:04]
A
Yeah. It has to have beast mode. You can't have Pac man without beast mode. When you tell people you're a space architect, this is what you do. What's the dumbest thing they've asked you and have I asked you it honest.
- [53:14]
B
The silliest, goofiest question usually asked by kids when I say that is like, how do you go to the bathroom?
- [53:19]
A
Yeah, how do you go to the bathroom?
- [53:20]
B
And out of space they suck it away. There's like a little bit of counter pressure. So you sit down and there's like a little bit of a tube.
- [53:27]
A
It's like the airlines where it goes right away.
- [53:30]
B
Yeah. So this is one of the things
- [53:32]
A
if you think about for number one and number two.
- [53:34]
B
Yeah.
- [53:34]
A
Oh wow.
- [53:35]
B
Basically. Yeah.
- [53:36]
A
So you sit and you like put this tube inside of you.
- [53:39]
B
Not quite inside, but like.
- [53:41]
A
I hope everybody gets their own tube.
- [53:43]
B
Yeah, everybody gets their own hygienic adapter to your body to be able to help you relieve your softened space. But this is one of those things that, that there's like a very pragmatic way in which this was designed for the International Space Station. If we're going to actually welcome tens of thousands of people to orbit, we needed to design all different aspects of that.
- [54:01]
A
You need some toto engineering.
- [54:04]
B
We met Toto Washlett. Really nice bidet floating. Although that also. Woo boy.
- [54:08]
A
I mean if I paid, let me tell you, I Paid $400,000,000 for your.
- [54:13]
B
You want your Tote.
- [54:14]
A
I really want a tote.
- [54:15]
B
I want your list after this. You're going to be my plus one. You can be my guinea pig if you agree. So I need your list.
- [54:19]
A
I would actually totally go do it.
- [54:21]
B
Okay.
- [54:21]
A
We end every episode of Smart Girl. Dumb questions. Asking our guests what they are dumb about. You know, so many things. You know, about physics, about philosophy. What's a question you have that you are afraid to ask out loud?
- [54:32]
B
I'm obsessed with the idea of personalized healthcare. I've heard of peptides. All these people are doing peptides. Should we be doing peptides? That's my dumb question.
- [54:43]
A
Oh, I love it. We just had a longevity episode that is out right now. Just like, just went out.
- [54:47]
B
I saw the doctor, the woman who was talking to you.
- [54:50]
A
Yeah, I don't know about this peptide thing. I'm not sold, but I'm curious. I actually, recently, it's kind of gray
- [54:54]
B
market, but then you have to, like, send some of it to the Czech Republic to get it tested for purity before you take it. Like, there's just all this crazy stuff. Yeah, so that's questions.
- [55:02]
A
We're not talking about peptides here.
- [55:03]
B
That's my dumb question is like, how to do peptides?
- [55:05]
A
How to do peptides. Okay, great. We will not answer it for all kinds of, like, medical disclaimer reasons. But thank you so much, Eric, for coming on. We so appreciate it.
- [55:13]
B
Thank you so much for having me. This was a blast.
- [55:18]
A
What do you think? Would you move to the moon or lower Earth orbit or to Mars? Would you commute there, like, from Monday to Friday on rush hour? I'm so curious. You can leave us a comment, let us know what you think. You can call us at 1-855-MYDUMBQS or drop us an email at neymaraza101, mail.com because I'm fascinated to know what you. You thought of that conversation from my perspective. I love how Ariel sees space and the potential of it. Like, I think there's a lot of beauty in the kind of architecture she's talking about. The. The Earth ring, the cathedrals in outer space. I think there's also a set of practical considerations, like some philosophical and also practical considerations that are meaningful for Earth as well as to space. So, like, who owns the fruits of our labor? What? Like, to whom does the Earth and, you know, space belong? Is it the people that get there first? Is it the people that helped us get there? Is it the people whose science, history, taxpayer money, dollars, got you there in the first place and who governs that. I think that it's scary to think about expanding our presence in the universe when sometimes it feels like we're not doing the best job on Earth. Anyways, that's it for this episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions. Write us, call us, text us, whatever. If you have $400 million to buy a space retreat, like, definitely text me and invite me to come with you. I'm Nae Maharraza, your host. This episode was produced with Desta Wonderad, Melissa Lee Gibson, Sanjana Nagam. It was edited by Darlena Chiem, mixed and engineered by Johnny Simon. Special thanks to Aisha Jordan. And we'll see you next week for an all new Smart Girl Dumb Question.