The Future of Space Stations with Ariel Ekblaw

Summary

StarTalk Radio – “The Future of Space Stations with Ariel Ekblaw”

Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Co-Hosts: Chuck Nice, Gary O’Reilly
Guest: Dr. Ariel Ekblaw (Founder & CEO, Aurelia Institute; Director, MIT Space Exploration Initiative)
Date: May 29, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the evolving landscape of space stations as the International Space Station (ISS) approaches decommissioning around 2030-2031. Dr. Ariel Ekblaw, a leading innovator in space architecture and modular habitat design, joins Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts to discuss next-generation space station concepts, the shift toward commercial operations in low Earth orbit, and the exciting intersection of biology, engineering, and economics driving the future of human spaceflight.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The End of the ISS and What’s Next

• ISS History & Obsolescence: The ISS, built with Cold War-era technology, is nearing its operational end after nearly four decades in service.
  • “No one would come near any piece of technology that's 35 years old today.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson [07:32]
• Decommissioning the ISS: NASA aims for a safe deorbiting process, largely planning to drop remaining modules into the Pacific after extracting valuable components for new stations.
  • “2031 is decommissioned. Code for drop it out of orbit.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson [08:28]
  • Point Nemo: The intended splashdown site is the most remote location on Earth; at times, when the ISS passes overhead, it’s closer to people in orbit than to anyone on Earth.
    • “If you're in Point Nemo, you're farther away from any other human... except when the ISS flies over, then you're only 250 miles from a human.” — Ariel Ekblaw [10:01]

2. The Future: Modular & Self-Assembling Space Stations

• Design Evolution: The transition from single large modules (limited by rocket fairing size) to self-assembling, modular structures inspired by both nature and science fiction.
  • “We're talking IKEA… flat pack everything… It's Lego. It's space Legos. With magnets.” — Conversation among all [12:32–14:12]
• Biomimicry: Ariel’s work draws inspiration from protein folding, ant colonies, and other biological systems to enable self-assembly and efficient design.
  • “How proteins fold within the body or fold up into DNA… swarms of termites and ants… They can take their tiny little bodies and bridge a gap that is bigger than anything.” — Ariel Ekblaw [15:17–15:32]
• Structural Innovations:
  • Spheres: Geodesic domes (or “buckyballs”) maximize volume for minimal material and are optimal for microgravity labs.
  • Artificial Gravity: Plans for spinning ring habitats to simulate gravity, with gradual phase-in from modular spheres to larger rotating structures.
    • “At Aurelia Institute, our nonprofit… we've just released a paper on artificial gravity and our particular take on it.” — Ariel Ekblaw [23:27]
    • “The dirty little secret about [rotating rings] is… you’re gonna feel different gravity at your head… than at your feet.” — Ariel Ekblaw [26:40]

3. Materials, Assembly, and Spacecraft Logistics

• Magnetic Self-Assembly: Using magnetic forces to autonomously dock modular tiles in space—efficient due to zero friction and no need for traditional fastening mechanisms.
  • “The magnets pull the tiles together… a free force of nature… Because you couldn't do it on Earth.” — Ariel Ekblaw [24:30–24:42]
• Air Seals & Pressure: Mechanical clamps (not just magnets) maintain internal air pressure; compares spherical construction to a classic soccer ball with pentagons and hexagons.
  • “It's a glorified soccer ball. We're sending a soccer ball to space.” — Ariel Ekblaw [37:43]
• Lessons from Earth: The challenges of space construction are contrasted with deep-sea engineering; pressure differentials in space are actually less than at ocean depth.
  • “In space you only have one atmosphere… at the bottom of the ocean you have 10, 20, 30, 50 atmospheres of pressure.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson [39:02]

4. Science & Industry in Orbit: Why Manufacture in Space?

• Unique Advantages: Certain processes—like protein crystallization, ball bearings, and tissue engineering—benefit from microgravity (e.g., no convection or sedimentation).
  • “You can do tissue engineering in zero G in a way that you cannot do on Earth… artificial retinas… layers are perfect.” — Ariel Ekblaw [32:12–32:43]
  • “Merck’s cancer drug Keytruda… they figured out a way in space to get more precise, consistent crystallization… took it from an IV to a shot.” — Ariel Ekblaw [33:40–34:01]
• Cost of Access: Launch costs continue to plummet (from ~$10,000/lb to potentially $200/kg), thanks to innovations like SpaceX’s Starship.
  • “About $1,500 a kilogram today… with Starship… expected to be $200 a kilogram.” — Ariel Ekblaw [36:00–36:32]

5. Public-Private Partnerships & the Economic Frontier

• Transition to Private Enterprise: The ISS National Lab model enabled subsidized research; now, companies like Axiom and Vast are building modules with private investment.
  • “Now we are ready for commercial space… companies… getting hundreds of millions of dollars in VC investment…” — Ariel Ekblaw [45:31]
• Regulatory and Ethical Challenges: Balancing NASA’s rigorous standards with commercial agility is critical to safe, responsible growth.
  • “We try to marry the two together… try our best to get the best of both worlds into this next phase.” — Ariel Ekblaw [49:56]
• Historical Analogies: The development of airmail mirrored today's government-to-commercial transition in space operations.
  • “How do you make a telescope cost 100 times as much? Put it in space.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson [41:35]
  • “The model is just the interplay between the needs of government and the needs of private enterprise.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson [51:16]

6. Off-World Industry: Data Centers & Space-Based Solar

• Heat Dissipation Challenges: Without convection, cooling in orbit is difficult; modular “tile” designs with distributed radiators are proposed for AI data centers.
  • “Can we use this self-assembly mechanism… put the compute you need on an individual tile, solar panel on that tile… radiator on the backside…” — Ariel Ekblaw [54:18–54:34]
• Space-Based Solar Power: Beaming energy to Earth via microwaves or (safer) infrared, with pilots already being explored for major corporations.
  • “Overview Energy… a flashlight from orbit… you can shine it on existing PV arrays, on photovoltaic cells.” — Ariel Ekblaw [60:11]
  • “They just signed a deal with Meta to power Meta’s data centers.” — Ariel Ekblaw [61:17]

7. Space Debris and Safety Concerns

• Vulnerability of Large Structures: The risk of collisions with 14,000+ Starlink satellites and orbital debris.
  • Modular tiles can be moved out of harm’s way; damaged ones can be replaced.
  • “If you know where the debris is coming from, you can pop a few tiles out of the way… pass through it.” — Ariel Ekblaw [62:42]
  • “Let it hit the tile… then you just pop a new tile in and frisbee it back down.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson & Chuck Nice [63:11–63:29]
• Efforts in Remediation: Concepts like “Pac-Man for space” under study by ESA and commercial entities.
  • “If you can fly through… you can aggregate and then burn up… some serious efforts to try to remediate the debris problem.” — Ariel Ekblaw [64:24–64:40]

8. Timelines and Next Steps

• Demonstrations: Two successful in-ISS autonomous self-assembly demos have occurred; larger experiments are scheduled for free-flying in LEO by 2027.
  • “We've done two successful low Earth orbit trials inside of the ISS… Rendezvous Robotics will do the first ever in LEO… not inside ISS but in free space… 2027.” — Ariel Ekblaw [67:02–67:34]
• Big Picture Goals: Attach first self-assembling modules to commercial space stations by the ISS decommissioning in 2031–2032.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “Why are you and NASA ignoring what every sci fi writer knows? You rotate your space station!” — Neil deGrasse Tyson [22:44]
• “We're talking IKEA… It's space Legos. With magnets.” — Chuck Nice & Ariel Ekblaw [12:32–14:12]
• “We’re sending a soccer ball to space.” — Ariel Ekblaw [37:43]
• “I changed my focus… to work on space infrastructure that is good for life on Earth.” — Ariel Ekblaw [57:36]
• “Antarctica is warmer and wetter than Mars and no one is lining up to build condos in Antarctica.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson [57:56]

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Important Timestamps

• Decommissioning ISS / Point Nemo: [06:44–10:18]
• Physics of Self-Assembling Modular Space Habitats: [11:33–15:17]
• Biomimicry in Space Design: [15:17–17:04]
• Artificial Gravity / Rotating Habitats: [22:41–27:25]
• Industrial Applications / Made in Space: [29:15–35:08]
• Launch Costs and Access Economics: [36:00–36:34]
• Space-Based Data Centers and Solar Power: [52:15–61:17]
• Debris Management and Modular Resilience: [62:08–64:45]
• Development Timelines and Future Missions: [65:33–68:18]

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Tone and Flow

The conversation is lively, playful, and full of infectious curiosity, punctuated by jokes, pop culture (IKEA, Spaceballs, soccer balls, Pac-Man), and deep respect for scientific rigor. Ariel Ekblaw’s approachable explanations are balanced by Neil’s probing, sometimes irreverent questions and Chuck’s comic relief.

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Takeaway

This episode paints an optimistic, practical vision for the future of human activity in space: modular, self-assembling stations shaped by biological inspiration; industrial applications from biotech to AI; a shift toward commercial partnerships; and a steady focus on projects benefiting both off-world exploration and life on Earth. As old barriers fall—technological, economic, regulatory—we’re entering an era where sweatpants in space and "Made in Space" products could soon be part of everyday reality.

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Final quote: “We will eventually see sweatpants to the moon… Crocs in space!” — Ariel Ekblaw & Co-Hosts [51:56–52:10]

Transcript

[Chuck Nice]

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[Gary O'Reilly]

y mismo StarTalk radio is presented by Pluto TV. It's a universal truth. Pluto is not a planet. Pluto tv, on the other hand, holds a universe of free entertainment we can stream from our own planet. Check out the ever expanding list of supernatural favorites including Fringe, the X Files, Battlestar Galactica, and a full fleet of Star Trek series You can stream for free. No payment, just pure discovery. See what's landing on Pluto tv. Stream now. Pay never.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Gary yes, we just learned that the future in space does not include the iss.

[Gary O'Reilly]

It's going down space drama.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, hopefully they take the astronauts out first, though.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, we'll send Chuck's note along. Coming up, what our future in space will probably look like because we got the expert on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition, which means I got Gary O'Reilly right next to me.

[Chuck Nice]

Gary.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Hey, Neil. And Chuck.

[Chuck Nice]

Nice. What's Up, Neil.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right. So Gary, I don't know how you came up with this subject. You and Lane over in la.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Alright, yeah, we had a little help from Lindsey Walker and Lindsey Walker. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So my co author, Lindsey Walker.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yes. And credit to both Lindsay and Lane. All right, let's get into this. Consider this. The ISS is to be decommissioned International Space Station.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

For those who have never listened to this show ever at all.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And that's due 2030, 2031. So now you start to extend your thought process. So what will replace it? What will Earth's orbital space look like? What new technologies are going to emerge? Will Earth's orbit become an annex for our off worlding, our industries?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I love that phrase, off worlding. And that's just. That just sounds.

[Chuck Nice]

It sounds so like futuristic and spacey.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I mean, I have to get off world right now.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm telling you, I'm a wanted man. I have to get off world.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Off world.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah. So I mean that's gonna be prefixed with a big old dollar sign.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Once you start to get into those areas, there's a lot to unpack. So let's bring on our guests, shall we?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right. We got a guest here. You know, it'll take me half the show to read the credentials here.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Then don't read them all.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, I'm gonna read them all. Okay, we have Ariel Ekblisle. Did I pronounce your name correctly?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I did, sir.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Ariel, welcome back to StarTalk.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Thank you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Star Talk. You were last on during COVID Yes, and I have no memory of anything that happened during COVID And I didn't even have Covid.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Don't we all?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's not my excuse. So you are founder and CEO. I love anybody who's that of anything. Founder and CEO of the Aurelia Institute, whose mission is to bring humanity space exploration future to life.

[Chuck Nice]

Nice.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I'm working on it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, making the future now.

[Chuck Nice]

Now.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Okay. Founder and Director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative.

[Chuck Nice]

Mm, look at that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Man, that is serious.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Been busy.

[Chuck Nice]

Some serious stuff.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Hashtag nerd would also suffice.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, that's true. Hashtag nerd, like geek. Nerd squared. NASA Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium on the executive committee of that. Okay.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Obviously. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And you've actually worked on space hardware that's on the surface of Mars right now. Oh, wow.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I got to see.

[Chuck Nice]

So your parents are really disappointed in you. Just like I don't know what happened.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I never did learn to fly. They are. Oh God, the underachiever.

[Chuck Nice]

I was.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Get out Parents are Air Force pilots. Both of them?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes, my parents are both pilots.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You're such a disappointment.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

What's left, though? Double pilot parents. You gotta go to space.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right. That's so true. Okay, mom, dad, stay in the atmosphere.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I don't care. So what piece of hardware is on Mars that you touched?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah, I got to work on Sherlock on the perseverance rover, Mars 2020, which is looking for, in NASA's classic terminology, can't say, looking for life. Looking for signs of past habitability on the Martian surface.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Looking for life.

[Chuck Nice]

Look at that.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Looking for life.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Looking for life. That's the current rover. It's still an active rover.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Don't tell me it's got a deer stalker hat and a magnifying glass just running around on the Martian surface.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Very Sherlock Holmesy. No, I'm delighted to learn all of this. Now the bit that you worked on, that was at jpl, I guess, when they assembled it. So you didn't like sneeze on it before they launched it?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Not to my knowledge.

[Chuck Nice]

And now there is life on Mars. Well, what do you know?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This aerial snot on Mars that come

[Ariel Ekblaw]

to life, snuck past that planetary protection protocol, right?

[Chuck Nice]

The Andromeda Strain. It's the aerial strain.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Aerial strain. Oh, God, the horror. They bake those things out, though, they gotta really heat them up before they send them. So I'm pretty sure that my little fingerprint gets baked off of that aluminum.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Or the booger that you put on

[Chuck Nice]

it when you what that do.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Stop, stop.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, let me get. Let me start off here. So the International Space Station, I mean, I'm old enough to remember when it was debated when we wanted to make sure. Because at the end of the Cold War, all these Russian aerospace scientists, we didn't want them going to our enemy. So the original space station, which was called Space Station Freedom, we retooled that to bring in the Russian astronauts. And only then did it become the International Space Station, bringing in the Japanese and Europe and the like. So when was that? Early 90s. So that was 35 years ago. And no one would come near any piece of technology that's 35 years old today.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Oh, for sure.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

If I say, oh, look at this shoulder mounted cell phone or whatever. So we have a space station that is way older than anything you would deign to use today here on Earth. So just put this in context now. Did they not build, in its obsolescence, Future proof.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah, future proof. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Or future proof, we know it's going to be. We're going to drop it out of the sky or we have swappable panels everywhere now.

[Gary O'Reilly]

The future's become exponential. So the.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So tell me.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah, yeah. So how do you prepare? I think that's a great point. Yeah. It's basically debated, thought about in the 80s debated. And then built in the 90s, flown in the early 2000s. So it's like a home that desperately needs a reno. It's really old. And what we're looking at now is what's the. The next opportunity to build modern technology into space architecture fundamentally for this next wave of commercial space stations that are going to replace the International Space Station when it does get decommissioned. 2030.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

2031 is decommissioned. Code for drop it out of orbit.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Fiery death.

[Chuck Nice]

Fiery death.

[Gary O'Reilly]

We're going to decommission small object. This is sizable.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes. And it's no small feat for NASA to be able to do that. Well, I think there's a lot of orbital dynamics planning and reentry, drag engineering.

[Chuck Nice]

What's the difference between something that large and things that are deorbiting all the time?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah. Whether they burn up completely on reentry, whether they fully incinerate or whether for the case of the iss, probably parts of it will end up being intentionally plopped in the ocean or somewhere if it's not fully burning up on reentry.

[Chuck Nice]

Unless you're China, in which case you

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

don't care where you throw your garbage.

[Chuck Nice]

China throwing their garbage all over the world.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

To do it safely and well means you drop it into the great toilet bowl of space, which is the Pacific Ocean.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And not on the Pacific Ocean is one third of all longitude on Earth. If you can't plunk a satellite into that, damn, you got problems.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Right, yeah. Just don't hit Point Nemo. Right. Because on Point Nemo, the craziest thing.

[Chuck Nice]

Point Nemo.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Point Nemo is the most remote place.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Is that where Finding Nemo went?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

If only Point Neo, then we'd know where he was.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

[Chuck Nice]

That was good.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I'm just learning from the best. I'm learning from the best.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That was so good. Okay, so what is Point Nemo?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Nemo is the most remote place on Earth. So if you're in Point Nemo, you're farther away from any other human than any other landmass. Except when the International Space Station flies over, then you're only 250 miles away from a human. So when, you know, when it goes over point numero, you're closer to space humans than you are to Earth humans.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow. And doesn't that sound like heaven to be close to space?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, if you like being alone. To Earth humans, if you're like a hermit. Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Is there any way you can disassemble the ISS before you bring it back?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes, I suspect that there will be part of the ConOps concept of operations as they're going to pluck some of the different modules apart rather than just trying to have the entire kind of unwieldy structure with all those solar panels.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why would you do that? Is it because you can reuse it? Something from 35 years ago? Let the damn thing burn up.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah. So this is the crux of NASA's plan that just got re announced with ignition. So we have Jared Isaacman, new NASA administrator. Exciting times. They are going to double down on this idea that the new commercial space stations who are going to replace the International Space Station, first they attach to the existing iss, they build up their modules, and then it's like the Phoenix rising from the ashes of the iss. The remainder of the ISS that's not going to be kind of consumed and built into the future, the remainder of the ISS will be deorbited.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm going to say that's a pretty damn good plan.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

It's a cool plan.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That means sending astronauts out and the risk of that. And you're putting people in jeopardy.

[Chuck Nice]

Space construction, man.

[Gary O'Reilly]

What could go wrong?

[Chuck Nice]

That is awesome.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Come on.

[Chuck Nice]

We all know that when you have space construction, okay. That a jump scare is coming.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

This is what I'm really passionate about. How do we start to build things way bigger than the International Space Station, where each module could only be as big as your biggest rocket. They then put a bunch of them together. But what if you could build a room.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wait, just to unpack that. So the biggest module was what could fit in the payload bay of a shop. So there's no piece up there that's bigger unless you're gonna fold it. But so all those cylindrical pieces, they like within.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Oh, crazy tolerances.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Crazy tolerance, right. Because you max that out. And so the shuttle and the space station complete each other. Oh, my cue.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Are we talking flatback we are talking flatback.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

We're talking ikea.

[Gary O'Reilly]

NASA are gonna go to ikea. You took the thought out of my mind. Because we told kilos equal dollars in terms of payload.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, go ahead.

[Gary O'Reilly]

No, no. So this is where you're taking it. Where do you get your cues for design? Now we know we're going to flat pack everything. Where do we get our cues from design? Is it the 35 year old tech or are we thinking something or even

[Ariel Ekblaw]

further back than that in some sense, even further back. So it's like this vision from science fiction of how do you have massive structures that are way bigger than your biggest rocket payload fairing. And there's this idea from Buckminster Fuller. So even well before the International Space Station was designed of buckyballs. Geodesic domes. Why do we love spheres in space? Because for a given surface area, you're optimizing for all that volume. Most efficient shape.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay, I can't resist saying this. You're inventing Spaceballs. Awesome. Sorry, we could not keep that in my mind.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Slowly but surely.

[Chuck Nice]

Slowly but surely.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Spaceballs.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, when exactly does dark helmet enter the equation? Is that his name?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Dark helmet, yes. Not Darth Vader. Not Darth Vader.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Darth Helmet.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Dark helmet. Self assembling baseballs.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, very nice.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

That's the idea.

[Chuck Nice]

So why either. Why not? Or in addition to, would you not use printing? Since we are now able to print extremely strong, very light metals.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So 3D printing?

[Chuck Nice]

Yes. 3D printing, yes.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I think the answer is yes. And okay, so we definitely want innovative structures in space. We want self assembling, modular things.

[Chuck Nice]

Gotcha.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

The reason we want modularity, that's not just 3D printed. Because then it's. When it's 3D printed, it's done.

[Chuck Nice]

It's a done deal.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

If you get damaged on one of my modular flat packed panels that have since popped out of their can.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Self assembled. You can remove a tile, pop a new one off. Or if you had a window tomorrow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's Legos.

[Chuck Nice]

It's Lego.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

It's Legos. It's space Legos. With magnets.

[Chuck Nice]

Legos.

[Gary O'Reilly]

If you're making a sofa magnet.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

Nice.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay, we'll get onto magnets.

[Chuck Nice]

But that's.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And since you're in zero G, you will never step on a Lego LEGO piece and hurt your feet.

[Chuck Nice]

You'll never hear a astronaut in the middle. Well, it's always the middle of the night. Go God damn.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

God damn.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Leave your lingo.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So if you're making the spherical construction, that's Tessellation of shapes. So that becomes biomimicry.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

It does. My PhD at MIT was really inspired by ideas in biology of how nature self assembles.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And what department was that?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I was in between Aeroastro Course 16 and the MIT Media Lab, which is very creative architecture.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I know. Yeah. We've had people from there here before. Right. So they couldn't fit you anywhere, so you had to straddle. Yeah, all right, all right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay. The irony is you wouldn't trust a 35 year old technology.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, I wouldn't.

[Gary O'Reilly]

But we've gone to mother nature for cues to design the.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Tell me some of your nature cues.

[Chuck Nice]

Ah, yeah, that's cool.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Self assembly, like how proteins fold within the body or fold up into DNA.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Very cool.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

And then other examples of small units like swarms of termites and ants. They can take their tiny little bodies and bridge a gap that is bigger

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

than anything I've seen that they self

[Chuck Nice]

attach to each other.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It scares the hell out of me.

[Chuck Nice]

And create structures.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

If they had a bigger brain, we would be nervous.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, they would be.

[Chuck Nice]

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

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes. Because they just.

[Chuck Nice]

They climb on top of each other, create a raft. And then the ones on the bottom, they're just like. I'm so sorry.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Sor. Oh God.

[Chuck Nice]

My buddy Adam gave himself for us all.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Guys, just a quick brain fact recently learned by me. We grew up hearing that of course we don't have the biggest brains. We have the biggest brains relative to our body weight.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So you have to perform some math magic to get us back at the top of that list. Otherwise we're fourth behind whales, dolphins and elephants.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Gotta normalize. Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

However, that's not even true. We're only fourth. We're only the top of the brain to body weight ratio among mammals. Really? If you bring in mid sized birds. Because birds are very light.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, they are.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You bring in mid sized birds, we are behind birds.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And you know who beats everybody out?

[Chuck Nice]

Who?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Some species of ant. And you know they got big hands.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes. They have giant ants.

[Gary O'Reilly]

You see the heads up.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So do ants. So I'm just saying.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

He was just fact checking us here, talking about these ants.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. I'm just saying, you got ants doing everything you're describing. They're probably doing calculus in their head.

[Chuck Nice]

That wouldn't be funny.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Stupid humans. Still trying to figure out calculus. Jesus Christ. Look at them. Building above ground, housing Dumbasses.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Above ground housing.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That's right.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Take them to Mars. They're going to help us do that. All that below ground, have them do all the construction.

[Chuck Nice]

There you go.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I've always wondered why Hollywood aliens tend to have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, ears, head, shoulders, neck, arms, legs, fingers, toes. Maybe it's because an actor is donning a costume. That's one of the reasons why I wrote Take me to your leader. It's to explore all that is possible in this universe beyond what has yet to to be imagined by Hollywood. So that for your first alien encounter, you'll be prepared. You'll have some anticipation of what they could look like, what kind of ship they arrived in, what you should or should not say, or should or should not presume. I narrated the audiobook. The print version is available as well. You better get the book now before you have that first alien encounter. Because afterwards it'll be too late.

[Chuck Nice]

I am so happy to welcome NOCO as a sponsor to StarTalk. Established in 1914, Noco provides industry leading battery power solutions including jump starters, tire inflators, battery chargers, lithium batteries and a wide range of accessories. Through its innovative design, it provides users with dependable power for home, business and recreational needs. The GB40 is a 100 ant lithium jump starter that weighs 2.4 pounds. It handles gas engines up to 6 liters and diesel up to 3 liters, covers most cars and SUVs on the road and can do up to 20 jump starts on a single charge. It's not just a jump starter, it's a USB C power bank, a 100 lumen flashlight with SOS and strobe. And here's why I'm really, really happy to welcome Noco. Because I have a Triumph T120 and it sits during the winter because I don't ride during the winter. And every spring the battery is dead. Thanks to noco, I don't have to worry about that anymore. I used to have to take this pretty heavy bike and run it down the hill so I could pop the clutch and start it. And if that didn't work, well, let's just say I didn't have to go to the gym for a week because I had to push it back up the hill. But now, thanks to noco, guess who's jump starting and hitting the open road? That. That would be me. If you've ever been stranded or worried about being stranded, if you're ever worried about anything dying on you, I mean aside from your house plants, you need the peace of mind that NOCO brings you. Let it live your trunk in the back of your SUV and then drive with peace of mind. Or keep it in your garage and don't worry about your little Bonnie when you have to charge it up and get on the open road. Noco pick it up at no co gb 40 that's n o co gb 40 use code startalk at no co for 10 off while it lasts. That's s t a R T A L K at n

[Gary O'Reilly]

support for StarTalk radio comes from talkaboutpd.com let's talk about a condition many people haven't heard of and it turns out it's more common than you'd think. Peyronie's disease, or PD for short. PD can happen when scar tissue builds up under the skin of the penis. This can cause a curve with a bump during an erection and for some men lead to pain during intimacy and may impact mental health. It may also lead to anger and frustration, depression, lower self esteem, and even withdrawal from sexual activity and physical intimacy. Because of this, some men could feel embarrassed or reluctant to talk about pd. The actual cause of PD isn't always known. In some cases it may be linked to a minor injury or repeated injuries during sex or other physical activity. The good news is PD is treatable. If you notice a curve with a bump, a trusted urology specialist can help diagnose it and walk you through your options, including non surgical treatment. To learn more about Peyronie's disease, visit

[Chuck Nice]

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Ariel.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I want an answer to this.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why are you and NASA ignoring what every sci fi writer knows? You rotate your space station. You do so that no one has to complain about bone loss and 0G and muscle loss and eyeball. And rotate something so you get artificial

[Chuck Nice]

gravity, ear problems, all of that.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I have a five step plan. You do. This is phase zero. Yes. Oh, self assembling first.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

So pack them flat in a rocket, get that IKEA furniture, pop them out like a little PEZ dispenser. The magnets help the tiles self assemble. The first structure is a sphere. Because we want a microgravity lab, because we want to do biotech research, that

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

we can do that for the companies that are doing research.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes, scientists, like where I come from, from mit, all of that. But then the future absolutely is to try to tessellate structures and then spin them. And so at Aurelia Institute, our non profit, where we do all of this space architecture research, we've just released a paper on artificial gravity and our particular take on it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right, so you said about magnetism, self assembly, but there's a lot of magnetism around in space and other environmental issues. So you've got that to deal with.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What do you mean? What are you talking about?

[Gary O'Reilly]

What kind of space junk?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Earth's magnetic field.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Gotta consider that when we have magnets. Yeah. Space junk, it's not all that strong.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And then you've gotta make sure you've got 100% seal.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Gary O'Reilly]

On every facet of every tile.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

This was the hardest question.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, I was gonna say. Yeah, that makes sense.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes. And so the trade off to modular self assembly is you get all these seams. So what do we do with the seams? The magnets are what bring the exoskeleton together. So click, click, click in this big sphere.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And then using magnets in lieu of bolts and other fastening devices in addition.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

So the magnets pull the tiles together while they're still separated. So instead of using propulsion or a

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

consumable like air trash, you're exploiting a force of nature to do this. A free force of nature.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Exactly. Because you couldn't do it on Earth. And this is the elegance of self assembly in space.

[Gary O'Reilly]

You don't have the workforce issue.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

There's no friction.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So I hadn't put all this together the way you clearly have. If you have magnetic forces to otherwise move pieces in space requires some act of propulsion.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And if there's already a built in force, then you've got it.

[Chuck Nice]

You don't need to.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Then the magnets come. Okay.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

All right, so now step two.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let me finish what I'm talking about. Okay, I'm still explaining. Now we use the fancy word tessellate. Okay, fine, you tessellate. And what's that other word she used to.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I'm not telling you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You're gonna build a structure that you then will set. Rotating.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What sets it into rotation?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Ah. So the initial sphere that we're talking about, the buckyball, is not gonna rotate. What we're working on for the artificial gravity is more of what we call like a xylem. You know those tubes and plants that go up vertically along the length of the plant stem.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

We want to align.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That has a word. Xylem.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Xylem, Xylem and flow of. This is my like 4th grade memory from science. Xylem and phloem. So this is separate from the self assembling buckyball. But for the rotating artificial gravity station, the paper that we just put out is a bunch of cylinders. And you put the cylinders next to each other in a ring and then you spin that ring. And what sets that moving is you're going to have a bunch of motors. Basically you're going to have a bunch of traditional mechanized systems to get that going.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But something has to take on the angular momentum in the opposite direction. So what is that going to be?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

So we have a bunch of balance ballast. And the structure that we're doing is we're trying to think about. If you think about like a typical ring, like 2001 Space Odyssey.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Typical, typical 2001 Sci Fi ring in the movie.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah, we're sci fi nerds. Yeah, typical sci fi nerds.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So it's basically a ribbon. Some kind of ribbon. Yeah, yeah. And that's the. And then the gravity is closer to the radial. Right.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

The dirty little secret about that is if you're a human walking along that ring, you're gonna feel different gravity at your head.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

At your feet.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

At your feet.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Which is a lot of weird cross coupling effects for your vestibular system.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So we've changed that. Unless the ring is really huge.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And then the difference will be small.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Then we're talking like. Yeah, 100 kilometers. If you could pull off a ring that big. Very small. And then you won't feel sick. Right. Cause you're spinning, but you're spinning so slowly. Huge diameter. How do we do artificial gravity in 10 years and not 100 years. That massive ring could be 100 years from now. What do we do in the next 10 years to make it more feasible? Instead of a ribbon of a ring. That was a great word. We have these cylinder pipes where the gravity level is consistent when you're occupying it. So you're not changing the gravity from foot to toe. So it's kind of like changing the geometry a little bit. Ultimately it is a ring of cylinders that then gets spun.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. So everywhere within a cylinder has the same force of gravity.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

That's the idea. It's at that same.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But then what am I doing in that cylinder? I want to get to over here because that's where the gym is and this is where. Where the mess hall is.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

You do have to transit. And so we can't completely remove the cross coupling effects. If you're climbing towards the center, maybe the docking center of the ring, you're gonna go from normal gravity 1 g to 0. Gradually floating. But you can do a ladder. You can do ergonomic techniques to help get the humans upstairs.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So to be so worried about this variation from feet to head.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

When you apparently weren't worried when I was in no gravity at all. So. So what's a little gravity gradient between friends?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

In between friends? Between moments one moment to the next. It turns out it's tricky to basically have the human experience these gradient shifts. You really want to. When you go into zrt.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

How do you know that?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

We know that because of amazing studies done at mit.

[Chuck Nice]

There's some dude walking around right now who has zero balance at all. He's just falling all over the place.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Mike takes you. He's the one that she did the experiment on. Exactly.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Carnival rides. We get the Gravitron going and we play with people inside of it. Kind of true.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. I remember the Gravitron. That's the rotating thing. Yeah, yeah.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

It's a centrifuge.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Flying saucer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Human sized centrifuge. So we learned some from that from studies in that. And then there's also been a lot of science about when the astronauts first get to the International Space Station. Sometimes there's space sickness. They have to acclimate to the zero G environment. So we don't want you to be in a constant state of are you in real gravity or are you in zero g? You kind of want to pick one or the other and then give the humans as much time as possible to acclimate in those different regimes.

[Chuck Nice]

That's very cool.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

And so with the gradient changes from head to foot in zero g, you wouldn't have that at all. Because there is no head to foot in zero g. There's no up or down. There's no up or down.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Exactly right.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, gotcha.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

The reason we're so excited about this first phase, and then we're working towards our artificial gravity phase. But the first phase where you're staying floating, it's a big sphere. You're floating in a big sphere. We call it a geode because you have to think about how to subdivide a sphere on the inside. It's not a rectangular prism, so it's like little crystal chambers is kind of how we think about it. We want to do biotech, we want to do space infrastructure for the benefit of life on Earth first. And then we can kind of earn our right as a species to say, now let's go do artificial gravity, spin our habitat on the way to Mars and go explore the rest of ourselves.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay, so you touched on biotech. Can't we do basically almost everything you can do on the space station here on Earth in terms where you have the protein folding? Alpha fold three.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yep, alpha fold three.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All those aspects that gave them 90 plus percent accuracy on prediction.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Alpha fold three got the Nobel Prize. Right.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

With David Baker and Demis Hassabis, their AI folding for proteins. Yeah, Just one protein folding.

[Gary O'Reilly]

We had their head of it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Okay. Yeah, yeah. This is a great question. What can you do uniquely in the zero G environment that you can't do on Earth? I think there are.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I only know one thing. Can I say it?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You can make perfect ball bearings.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because the force is like. Back to her sphere comment. The sphere minimizes surface area and maximizes volume. Perfect ball bearing. That's all I know that you can make in space.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

took a case of wine. They did put it up into the space station.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Do you have a bottle? I feel like someone's gotta give you a bottle of wine.

[Chuck Nice]

I can neither confirm nor deny.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, the point was. So one case went up and one stayed on Earth. And then they left it there for

[Gary O'Reilly]

like, did the twin experiment.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It was exactly a Case of identical wine. And they brought it back and they wanted me to comment officially on what effect 0G had on the wine. And I felt bad saying this, but if you're in zero g, the sediment doesn't know what to do. And so that's the same thing as you go into your cellar, pull out a bottle, shake it out and put it back in.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Like it's gonna make it terrible.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You're simulating the one in space.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You just shake everything all the time.

[Chuck Nice]

Dr. Tyson, here's the wine. I cannot believe you bring this to me. Your wine is absolute swill. You insult me.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Keep going down the list. Yeah.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

So what can you do? So you don't have any convection, you don't have sedimentation. And then you have things that we sometimes typically think of as a difficulty, but in space can be a feature, not a bug. So use the vacuum or use radiation to do something.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, wow.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

So on the first two, the convection and the lack of sedimentation, you can do tissue engineering in zero G in a way that you cannot do on Earth. And a wonderful example is this company, LambdaVision, that's doing artificial retinas. Takes 200 layers of a really delicate little protein. And if you do it on Earth, you get little sagging effects. And with 200 layers, that amplifies the error.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Is this Lasix?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

It's not Lasix.

[Gary O'Reilly]

No, it's not Lasix.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah. It's a different process. It's bacteria.

[Gary O'Reilly]

No, that's why I asked it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

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

[Chuck Nice]

Yo, that's crazy.

[Gary O'Reilly]

We are now talking some serious low Earth orbit economy.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Exactly. Low earth orbit. Manufacturing, ball bearings, tissue engineering, fiber optic.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So this becomes pharmaceutical.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Gary O'Reilly]

However, you know full well the rarest of rare issues will get lost.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Whereas the biggest, the rare ailments within people, there's no money.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So the biggest, the big ticket number sort of issues. They'll be brought in.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

They'll be brought in. It's true. And a great example of that is Merck's cancer drug. Keytruda is a $30 billion cancer drug.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

They took it to space to figure out. They basically did a parameter sweep looking at the crystallization of the drug in space. And the amazing thing for Keytruda is they figured out a way to get more precise, consistent size of the crystallization of the drug. And it took it from an IV drug to a shot. So huge for patient quality of life. You don't have to go into a hospital to get to the hospital.

[Gary O'Reilly]

They couldn't replicate or extrapolate that on Earth.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Well, what they did, that's the magic of some of the tools now that we have on Earth. To your earlier point that some of the things on Earth are getting so close to being good for space. For Keytruda, the cancer drug, they use space to do this parameter sweep of a bunch of data that would have been really hard to get on Earth. And then they was.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You're exploring all the variables that affect an outcome.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And, and so you'll know what not to do, how to repeat.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Exactly right. But then they were able to figure out how to mimic part of the parameters that they did get in space on the ground. So they don't have to make every dose of Keytruda on the International Space Station.

[Chuck Nice]

No.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

So there's two examples. Tissue engineering, it's physical, it's at a macro scale. Even though we think of it as tiny, it's really macro scale for biology. That's good for those of us who want to build real estate and have a reason to expand our footprint in orbit. And then there's protein formulation and crystallization where maybe we get the data from space and then we help use that to inform Earth based processes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So in the future there'll be a shelf of biopharmaceutical products. Made in Space.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Made in Space by Snaps.

[Chuck Nice]

Look at that.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Made in Space.

[Chuck Nice]

We went from Made in Taiwan to Made in Space.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

There is a great company called Made in Space. They got acquired a couple years ago. They're doing 3D printing like what you were asking about.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, very cool.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

And yeah, this is, this is what we want to do with our first version of Tesserae, which is what we call the self assembling ball. We want it to be an orbital biolab with shelves and shelves and shelves of experiments that are good for life on Earth. And my mission is to design it in a way that my graduate students at MIT could go and do their own experiments as citizen scientists, well trained, but not astronauts their whole career. And that I think we're just at the cusp where the cost to get to space is getting low enough where that could be feasible in the next few years.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I Was gonna ask you that. A commonly quoted price is $10,000 a pound to orbit low. And that's dropped in the era of SpaceX with reusable boosters and things. What is it now?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

It's about 1500. Forgive me. I'm gonna switch units on you. It's $1,500 a kilogram.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is America.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I know. I'm a scientist.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow. Wow. You said it like those two things are in incongruent.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Damn Patriot scientist.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, just speak the metric slowly. Let's go.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

About $1,500 a kilogram today with starship coming online. These are not Elon's numbers. This is like independent analysis. It's expected to be $200 a kilogram.

[Chuck Nice]

Damn.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Which is like FedEx.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

If you ship something around the world. Cargo. Humans were a little more fragile. We're a little more expensive. But if you can ship cargo around the world, you can ship it to space. And that is unlocking this incredible inflection point in the space industry.

[Chuck Nice]

That's very cool. You know what? Can we. Because I think we skipped a step here and there's a gap in the construction. Because Gary asked about the seams.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

And that's very important because you can bring magnets together. But we're talking about the vacuum of space.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

We are.

[Chuck Nice]

So now, when you have these panels, what's going to keep this? Yeah, because you need.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You need something what holds your air pressure. What holds it?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Duct.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Tight seals. Velcro. Duct tape.

[Chuck Nice]

Made in space. Duct tape.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah. We prefer Velcro.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

No, we do. Clamps. So between all of the seams of this tessellated bucky ball that's made out of hexagons and pentagons. Those are the tiles that come together with the magnets.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Just a quick second. Isn't that a soccer ball?

[Gary O'Reilly]

You read my mind. Yeah. From 1970s, that was the tessellation of

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

the black and white.

[Chuck Nice]

That's the black and white ball.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Ball. Now, it's very different. But that was the 32 panel ball.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

That is exactly. It is a glorified soccer ball. We're sending a soccer ball to space. I played soccer as a kid. Maybe this influenced me more than I realized.

[Gary O'Reilly]

The only thing is, now I'm thinking, do you make a gigantic spaceball or do you now, Daisy. Change a certain size? I know. See Mel Brooks in your mind.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And just dovetailing that. As you know, we have bucky tubes where you. You break the ball in the middle and you extend it and you use the carbon geometry. You mimic that.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I guess that is an idea for how to maybe eventually do. A big diameter ring is a bucky tube with some curvature.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's a bucky inner tube.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Better.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Trademark that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Now bucky torus. Excuse me. Let's get mathematical on it.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

It changes. It does compress the tiles on the inside of the curvature. That's the base concept that we're trying to refine. But yeah, it's a glorified soccer ball. And the clamps are what keep the air pressure in. So you're gonna have force due to air pressure pushing out.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. Cause the air pressure's pushing out. There is no other pressure out there.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

And so everything kind of like. Kind of like a. Kind of like the airplane. Cause that's what happens in the fuselage.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Except it's not zero pressure outside.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And they don't pump the plane to atmospheric pressures. They drop it a little.

[Chuck Nice]

They drop it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But of course, whatever this is, it's nothing compared with going to the bottom of the ocean.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Oh, right.

[Chuck Nice]

Interesting.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because you have 10, 20, 30, 50 atmospheres of pressure that's ready to crush your ass. That's right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Everest. How deep is the Marianas Trench?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's 35,000ft deep.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That's more than Everest.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's farther down than Everest is tall relative to sea level. I'm just saying that in space you only have one atmosphere.

[Chuck Nice]

That's all you need.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

The Delta is much better. Much more favorable.

[Chuck Nice]

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[Gabby Windy]

Hi, I'm Gabby Windy with Long Winded. And I'm not gonna lie, I'm desperate. I'm desperate for your attention in any way possible. So listen to my podcast, won't ya? It has great insights, exceptional humor, and plenty of pop culture to fill your dark souls. And some even say it's a great way to fall asleep due to my soothing voice. And I don't take that personally. Fall asleep. A listen is a listen even when you're sleeping. And a view is a view even with your eyes closed, if you dare. And it doesn't take much gumption. Enjoy. Listen to Long Winded wherever you get

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Your podcasts for those crazy busy, crazy hungry days when cooking family dinner is off the table. There's Applebee's all you can eat a table full of unlimited family favorites for just $15.99. You get all the tender signature riblets, all the crispy boneless wings, all the golden brown double crunch shrimp and endless classic fries at a family friendly price. Applebee's all you can eat for just $15.99 per person per order. Now that's eaten good in the neighborhood. Limited time only, so hurry into your nearest Applebee's today. Hello, I'm Finky Marque Allen and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There's an old saying in my field. How do you make a telescope cost 100 times as much? Put it in space.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So we try to do everything we can on Earth's surface because the same amount of money that gives you one space telescope gives you 10 or 20 earth based telescopes. So we're very careful about if we're gonna do, we have to completely justify what we're doing in space. Gotcha. And so the cost of getting the experiment up there, doing the experiment and bringing it back.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's huge.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

It is huge.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You can build whole laboratories here on Earth for that cost.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So who's doing that calculation? Who's.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

So this is a great question. When we think about what makes sense to uniquely do in the space, we kind of want to rule out all the other different ways to do it here. And we want to do the cheaper things here first. So the first thing we might do is a zero gravity flight. Right. But if you're working with biology, biology responds on the orders of days and weeks, not seconds.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. The zero gravity flight, it's at most

[Ariel Ekblaw]

20 to 30 seconds. Affectionately known as the vomit. Calm down.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, when they. I was told this, I had no reason to doubt. When they filmed Apollo 13 with the director Ron Howard, that was a million zillion segments of these 90 second bits.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And they. Do it again.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Do it again.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And the plane has to go up and come down and then it's stitched together as one continuous zero G scene.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Exactly. I have done 14 of those flights in my life. I've never puked. My parents would disown me.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, God.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

But they're amazing. This is one of the.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I would puke like this, by the way. I'm the inadequate stuff. Just so you know.

[Chuck Nice]

Inadequate stuff.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's funny.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Plus in space if you needed something to sediment, you just centrifuge it.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes, exactly. You can always add back in the earth effects in zero ghc.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So here I am thinking who's financing this?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Is it the biotech guys? Is it government? Is it someone with an awful lot of money in the bank and just yeah, I'll do this because they want to corner that particular part of the market. And you know, biotech in low earth orbit is one aspect of a whole load of off world industries that just might just occur.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And let me put a question just ahead of that. Sure. I was active in advisory roles in the government at the time this came up. It was the space station. When it runs its course, should it be deputized as a national lab?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Right, right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because if it's a national lab, we already know how to sustain national labs. We've got, there's Los Alamos, there's Brookhaven. Right. So we know that model and what national labs do is the government does research that's not quite ready for the quarterly report or the annual report. It's just a little farther down the horizon. So the government is investing in itself but on a horizon that roi, venture capitalist corporate folks, they're not willing to go. That's right. And then you would apply for time on the station and the government would supplement that. And so whatever became of that.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

It's funny that you mentioned that that is what they did towards the end of the iss.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It did happen.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

ISS National Lab issnl that's actually happened. It did happen and it has been.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Pat me on the back.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

It's good advice.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Do you need this reassurance?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. I was one of several people who that made complete sense in the day

[Ariel Ekblaw]

and that enabled my PhD because as a student I was able to get basically subsidized support to fly my little self assembling prototypes via ISS National Lab. Now I think we're 10, 15 years after that. Now we are ready for commercial space. And so what NASA's going to do to replace the International Space Station is truly commercial modules where These companies like Axiom are getting hundreds of millions of dollars in VC investment. People out there really do believe they can make money off of not just biotech, but also ball bearings.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And this would be their module or their buckyball.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

This would be their tube. They're gonna go back to a pressure cylinder. We want our buckyball to be an appendage on the Axiom space station or the Voyager Star Lab or the vast space station. So we will be kind of next gen habitat tech. The gate gets tested out in the next five years on the attachment side of a more traditional space station that's gonna replace the International Space Station.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So we're talking about a new financial frontier that's benefiting them. Not us.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Benefits them.

[Gary O'Reilly]

The finance, private enterprise, the biotech guys.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, there's a medicine at the end, they become billionaires, but then you don't die tomorrow. How's that?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

That's the trick is like it's actually better than just it being science fiction like going to die on Mars. It's about infrastructure on Earth and where are they selling It's Earth based markets. It has to come back down and be of pragmatic use to someone on Earth for it to make sense. So I think that there's a nuance there. It can benefit life on Earth.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Although there's a lot of research about what you would do in space that serves other needs in space. We have a whole colony on the moon and you do something in space, it might be cheaper to take it to the moon than back to Earth.

[Chuck Nice]

You mean to the studio where you guys faked it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So ironically you want to get in on the ground floor with investment, but you're out in space.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, I see what you're doing.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Thank you very much.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So it appears I haven't been able to keep up with all of these space startups. And it seems that they each have a niche bit of technology that they want to contribute to this going forward. And looking forward in the Artemis, not even low Earth orbit Artemis, every next mission is trying to bring in more private space enterprise to basically offload what NASA might have done. Instead of NASA pitching tent, get someone else to pitch tent. So NASA building an orbital lunar space station, get somebody else to do it. And is that going as you'd expect?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

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

[Chuck Nice]

Also that SpaceX didn't care if they blew up rockets, whereas NASA blows up a rocket tax credit. Everybody goes frickin people lose their shit. Bad crap.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Crazy.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes. Yeah. They were able to build like a cult of personality around SpaceX because they got people engaged in the iterative prototyping and the failure. But yeah, NASA was never given the space to do that. And that is a tricky dilemma there.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Because you're up against the failure is not an option ethos from Apollo 13.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I love that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

When if you're doing something that's never been done before, you have to. Failure has to be an option.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

You have to iterate.

[Gary O'Reilly]

It's part of your success.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, that is. Yeah.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

And so that same playbook that worked with SpaceX for the International Space Station, NASA's doing for the moon, called CLPS, Commercial Lunar Payload Services, they're getting commercial companies to provide the transportation and the landing infrastructure for NASA to then be able to go out and do the science. And I think that there's a tension between watching NASA seed some of these activities to private enterprise. But what it's allowing NASA to do is what NASA does best. Let's free up NASA from the bit of an albatross of the International Space Station. Let's let NASA go figure out if there's life on Europa. That's something only NASA could do. And I think eventually we have to.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

There's no. And there's no money in that at all.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. Commercial money in that.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right.

[Chuck Nice]

We can't get away from by chance though, because private enterprise is about one thing and one thing only, and that is profit. Is there a chance that things like quality and integrity of mission and things along those lines would suffer in the cutting corners? By cutting corners, pursuit of optimizing profit.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I think this is a really important question for NASA. And part of what they have done is kind of hybrid themselves into this new domain for private enterprise by doing public private partnership. So vast and Axiom, they're still working closely with NASA because NASA has these incredible standards for the safety of human spaceflight. So I think what we're hoping to see in the space industry is that we don't just toss out everything that NASA learned, we take the best of what NASA learned and we take some of the maybe better agility that a commercial company would have and we try to marry the two together. Doesn't mean that there won't be the exact risk of that you said. But it means that we're trying our best to get the best of both worlds into this next phase.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So, by the way, this has fascinating precedence with the birth of airmail. So the government says, hmm, this is newfangled thing called aeroplane. And mail is a big part of who and what you are as a country. Maybe we can move it by aeroplane. So the government says, who can carry this load of mail at what price? And so people climb over each other to try to get that contract. And by climbing over each other, they're making better and better and better airplanes. And they reached a point where you can carry so many bags of mail, you say, forget the mail. I'm carrying people. And it transitions from just cargo to people. And just.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

That's a great metaphor, for sure.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The model here is just the interplay between the needs of a government and the needs of a private enterprise.

[Chuck Nice]

I never even thought that that's a progression, but it makes sense.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There's no U.S. postal Service airplanes. They're flying into Belly Delta Airlines.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And apparently right now, not getting lunch. But okay, but. So that partnership is so time honored, it's not even thought about anymore in that context.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

And that's a great metaphor too, because that inflection moment that we saw with aviation, where the costs started coming down, more people started flying, it went from you dress up to go into first class. And it was a luxury thing to now sweatpants. Sweatpants.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Don't worry, I think we will eventually see sweatpants to moon. You know, we will eventually see, oh,

[Gary O'Reilly]

gosh, let's go in your pajamas. Like you go to the supermarket in your pajamas and your crocs and then you just go to space.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Crocs in space.

[Chuck Nice]

Crocs in space.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I'm more Birkenstocks girl. But yeah, we do. Okay, I'm in.

[Gary O'Reilly]

If we're looking at lunar and we're looking at off world industry, are we looking at data centers taking them to the moon? Are we looking then at solar power? And that becomes a very different scenario. And we're taking away an issue here on the surface of Earth and putting it.

[Chuck Nice]

We really want to. Because. Okay, maybe I'm. I could be wrong here, because you two are the scientists.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We will totally tell you if you're wrong.

[Chuck Nice]

We will tell me. But Ariel just said a little earlier, there's no convection in space. The big problem with data centers is they give off an inordinate amount of heat. If there's no convection, then you need some place to push that heat. So then you would end up.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's the single biggest challenge, right? Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

I mean, how do you, you know, what do you do then?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah, this is. You have hit on the crux of the tension around this idea of AI data centers in space. Take one step back and say, yes, we should be figuring out how to do big infrastructure space and off world, just like we were talking about at the beginning of the show. For data centers in particular, what we think is going to have to happen is use a self assembled approach like TESS array to handle that. Because if you have a traditional data center, you have these little volcanoes of heat in the servers. You have to pipe out the heat via conduction to these huge radiators. And all you can do in space is radiative cooling. It's radiative heat transfer. If you had all of your computers,

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

just to be clear. So three ways you can move energy. So one of them is radiative, but the other two, which we live with here, we don't even think about it. It's conduction and convection. And convection, as you said, requires gravity for the light stuff to rise. Conduction is really slow. It's like I'm jiggling and now you're jiggling and then you're jiggling. So that's why the fireplace poker, it'll take 20 minutes for the handle to get hot when the other end is in the center. That's not an efficient way to move energy.

[Chuck Nice]

No.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. The radiator is just. It's photons coming off the surface, carrying it out into space. Okay, so that's. So pick it up there.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

So what we're trying to do with our decentralized tech for building things, even besides habitats, is can we use this self assembly mechanism, Put the compute that you need on an individual tile, put a solar panel that you need on that tile to get the energy you need. And on the backside is your radiator.

[Chuck Nice]

Whoa.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

And so you're doing hyper localized energy harvesting and radiator heat transfer for an AI data center.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Brilliant.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Are you able to scale that?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

So that's the vision for something like this that tessellates. It's like a honeycomb. You can finally, with this architecture, make something the size of four football fields that you could never origami up into a single rocket. So that's.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Origami is a verb. I love that. Origami. I used to do origami, so I'm feeling it. That one just got me excited. That's really cool. Do you origami I origami.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I origami. Do we all origami?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So I love the idea that your tile that is the solar panel.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's. I mean to first approximation, that's the energy you're gonna have to radiate away.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because it's just turned into something else. It becomes thermal rather than photonic. And so a surface the same size as the surface you're receiving, the energy would be about the right size. The radiator about the right size. To radiate it away, you just have to make. It's not facing another surface that's trying to radiate out because otherwise that out they just go. They heat each other.

[Chuck Nice]

That's all you're doing is still transferring the heat.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

So we have spun out a company to do this. So my passion for my life is habitats. I really want to scale humans in space with these curved self esteem.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

By the way, everybody at MIT spawns out companies just so you know. That's what.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

That's so we get taught to do.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's what they do. She just said it casually. That's a thing.

[Chuck Nice]

Nice.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's a thing.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah, it's called Pregnant again. Got another company idea.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This one goes Fortune 500.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

So we spun out Rendezvous Robotics. They're going to focus on what we call the beachhead market. So big massive, flat things in space like solar panels, radiators, AI data centers, maybe big communication antennas to get really big apertures much bigger than you could have gotten. Again, having to squeeze it up into a rocket. So Rendezvous Robotics does that and then I'm going to keep the nonprofit to do future work on space stations for human spaceflight.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And where does your money come from? For which piece your not for profit.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Not for profit is NASA grants, a little bit of corporate sponsorship and then philanthropy from visionaries who want to see a vision of space that is more inclusive, that is more transformative.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So rich people that just want to live the future all too old.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

They want to let

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

both of them.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I don't get any money from those two. I think it's more that we. And I used to be really obsessed with science fiction when I was younger. I really did want to go live on Mars and elsewhere someday. I think that'd be amazing for humanity. But I changed my focus in Aurelia Institute right around the time of the beginning of the pandemic to say I actually want to work on space infrastructure that is good for life on Earth. So our donors are people who are happy to support space, but they Want it to support life on Earth. They want it to be off worlding the AI data center so that you're not having that burden of the heat that's generated inside of our water vapor atmosphere. Right. That's why they're excited to support Aurelia. It's a little bit different than the other typical people that you think about in the space industry.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, well, the whole Mars thing, I mean, I'm sorry I've never said this publicly, but get over yourself. I mean, let's be honest here, you know.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Come on, you don't want to go?

[Chuck Nice]

No, I don't want to go and I don't think anybody else wants to. To really go. And it doesn't really make sense.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Antarctica is warmer and wetter than Mars and no one is lining up to build condos in Antarctica.

[Chuck Nice]

In Antarctica. Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

There's no Mars Tourist ball.

[Chuck Nice]

I think the whole Mars thing comes from the fact that ever since somewhere around the turn of the last century we developed this fascination and we were enamored of Mars and it's never left us. It's just never left.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It was Percival Lowell. Yeah, it's him and the king. He's a Mars fanatic on Mars. And he wrote a book called Mars. Then he wrote a book called Mars as an Abode of Life. Then he wrote another book called Mars and Its Canals. And everyone is thinking there's life on Mars. And then HG Wells heard about this. Then he wrote War of the Worlds with Martians coming and sucking our brains out. So we were off with the races at that point.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I'm with you guys on this. I think, I think humans should live in space stations that can spin. Why go to another gravity well that's only one third our gravity well? Which means we're not going to do well. We're not even sure a woman can bring a baby to term in one third G. So talk about Mars civilization. It's more like Mars Outpost.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So going back to offworld industry, is there a way, is there any thought being put towards harnessing solar power to redirect it back to Earth and make it more a universal.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

This is my favorite topic. I think AI data centers has captured a lot of people's attention recently.

[Gary O'Reilly]

It's the now. But I think a problem that really does need solving.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

China already has a plan to do that.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

They do.

[Gary O'Reilly]

There's a big flashlight in the sky.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah. Well no, I mean it's microwaves to beam down.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

There are a bunch of us based commercial companies who are now trying to compete and beat China to it. So we've known since the 70s that we could do this with microwaves. Just a little bit scary to think about. So the way it works is you take the energy from these solar panels in orbit. Way more efficient because you're getting raw unfiltered sunlight.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And you can do it 247 and

[Ariel Ekblaw]

you can do it 24 7. So you collimate, you gather this energy up, you convert it into microwaves. Not trivial, but you can do it. And you beam it down. But the problem with that is it's very Austin Powers lasers in spikes.

[Chuck Nice]

First of all, here's the problem with that. That's called a weapon.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah. The plane accidentally goes off course.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Oh yeah, Zap.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Cross that stream.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

So the company that we work with, Overview Energy, is a flashlight from orbit. So they're doing it with ir. The amazing thing about infrared. Infrared, the amazing thing about that is you can shine it on existing PV arrays, on photovoltaic cells, solar panels, so you don't have to build new structures.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, it's a transfer of photons to collectors here on Earth.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Two collectors here on Earth.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So you take the wrong. Wait, wait, hold on. But you still can't get through clouds.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes. So, so it's not. And this is the trade off. You can have perfect piercing efficiency with microwave or you can do ir. I think it's probably the only way regulatory wise on the Earth to get this approved. But then you do, you get attenuated by water vapor. So you have to do it on a clear sky day or you do it to a place in Australia or Arizona or desert, any desert, and then

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

you get it out.

[Chuck Nice]

We got a lot of desert, a

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

lot of desert in the world.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Transparent from where you capture.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

And interestingly, to connect the two topics, AI data centers and space based solar power. This company, Overview Energy that we work with, they just signed a deal with Meta to power Meta's.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh God.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Data centers.

[Chuck Nice]

So sorry.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Chuck has to blow a gasket once per. Once per episode.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Not the O rings. We're a little sensitive in the space industry. Blow a gasket, not an O ring. The Meta deal is going to have space based solar power power the AI data centers on the ground. So they're not trying to do it in space, which solves some of those challenges we were talking about earlier. Radiation. How do you handle the heat? They're going to have the AI data center on the ground, but use 247 clean energy to power it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And so they're not Microwaves. That's going to zap anything. Like all the satellites and space junk that's just flying around Earth.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah, yeah. It's not microwaves.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The cross section of the space station, last I checked, rivals that of a football field. When you include all the solar panels and the radiators and everything. You want to make something bigger than that.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That makes you that much more susceptible to the flying wallendas of space junk.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Damn.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. And space junk moving 18,000 miles an hour and you're just this billowy sail to collect it all. It's just. So how do you square your ambitions for large space architecture with the actual state of space junk?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

And space debris.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And space debris. And not to mention at this moment, last I checked, the 14,000 SpaceX satellites.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Right. And ever increasing count.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

For the really massive deployments, like Starlink satellites. Starlink satellites. Yeah, for the really massive deployments that Rendezvous Robotics would do. Our startup that's trying to do big surface area solar panels for AI data centers in space or something. The benefit of it being modular is if you know where the debris is coming from, you can pop a few tiles out of the way and you can pass through it. And that's the benefit of it not being a monolithic architecture. It's a decentralized architecture. The better answer is or.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But that'd be a lot of work.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Clean up the debris. The much better answer is how about that? Invest in remediation.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Because you've only got to get it wrong once. No, no, no, no moving those tiles.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, don't.

[Chuck Nice]

No, no, no, no.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Here's what you do.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, you don't pop the tile and let it pass through. What good is that? Let it hit the tile, it'll repair, then it'll absorb the debris and then

[Chuck Nice]

you just pop a new tile in.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Pop a new tile in and then you take that tile and frisbee it back down to Earth so it burns up and then you're good.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. I saw that. Format the whole thing out of rubber.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes, yes. Like flubber.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Like Flubber.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

This is great. We'll just combine the beachhead use case with the debris remediation all in one.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There you go.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

And then put.

[Gary O'Reilly]

No, but you're hoping for small sized debris, I have to tell you that.

[Chuck Nice]

And that's not a bad idea for space cleanup.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, most space debris is small. It's like size of marble.

[Chuck Nice]

It's very small.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, NASA has a. There's a whole website that NASA tracks.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

There is actually great progress being Made in trying to clean it up. There's ideas coming out of esa, European Space Agency, there's some companies trying to do Pac man for space.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I remember what that thing sounds like. Like not worried about you.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Computer game up.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let me hear it again, let me hear it again.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Perfect. Stop it. If you can fly through a more, you know, relatively more crowded part of orbit with some big capture area, then you can eventually amass enough mass that you will aggregate and then burn up in the afternoon.

[Chuck Nice]

And then burn up in the. Oh, that's great.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah. So there's some serious efforts to try to remediate the debris problem and not just solve around it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, so it's a self destructing object.

[Chuck Nice]

So you collect and then destroy with no problem. Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Cause as you're collecting, I don't know if it's the mass so much as it'll slow it down.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

It's the drag.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, the mass.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

And then you're right, I should say the envelope of this thing to get more drag from the upper edges of the atmosphere.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right, exactly. Plus anything that hits it head on, it'll slow.

[Chuck Nice]

Slows it down to it drops it

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

to a low or. And then it's a runaway.

[Chuck Nice]

I love it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's a self cleaning vacuum, that's what it is.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow, that's nice.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right, so what we've discussed so far is the International Space Station with an life expectancy about four or five years from now. What's the timeline for what we're discussing with you about Spaceballs? Space vacuums.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He wants to know when your company's going public. That's what he wants to know.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Maybe Rendezvous. Rendezvous Robotics is doing a priced seed round right now. So very early stage company. The Habitat work.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

How much do you need?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah, we'd be honored. Oh my God. The habitat company or not. Sorry, the habitat research within the nonprofit. We think that we want to be able to attach our self assembly module to whatever the first commercial space station replacement is. They have to have a replacement for the ISS by the time they burn it up. From a national security perspective, we're not going to agree to have no American or western world space station in orbit. So we're trying to be ready for.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Where there's a will, there's a way, and there is a will to make that. Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Where there's geopolitics, there's a way that's the biggest will out there.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah, exactly. Right. And so we want to be ready for that 2031, 2032 timeframe when the commercial Space station is up. The Phoenix from the ashes. We want to attach to that. So I've been working on this for a decade. I started my PhD in 2016. So it's not like I could just turn this project on and have it be feasible in five years. But 15 years. Yeah, but 10 years. We've already done five more years. Get ready to attach a proof of concept habitat. Self assembling habitat is the goal Rendezvous Robotics for the beachhead market stuff. They have to show that they can do customer traction in 2027, 2028, 2029. Like they don't get to have the pleasure that I have of doing longer term research. They have to really.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Have you had any low earth trials? Low Earth orbit trials?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Gary O'Reilly]

In the success of.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

We've done two successful low Earth orbit trials inside of the International Space Station where the tiles, we actually see them autonomously dance. They do this little pirouette in orbit to come together and dock and form the structure.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wow.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

The Rendezvous Robotics, our company is going to do the first ever in LEO low Earth orbit, not inside of the iss but in free space. Demo of much bigger like tiles. Bigger than the size of this table. About five feet on edge there. Next year in 2027, I got a physics question. Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

To bring tiles together.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Aren't they kind of attached to each other on launch and you have to separate them in order to reassemble them in a different way.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

What we think we're going to do is pack them so the magnets are on the edges of the hexagons and the pentagons. We're gonna pack them flat like Pringles in a can. And what will Happen is my Ph.D. i studied, let them all out in one big swarm and see if we can get them all to come together. It's too complicated. But it worked in simulation. What we're gonna do for the company is a tile comes out of the stack. It moves over another tile, immediately comes up and pops. They're gonna move out and they will build a spiral like the reverse of peeling an orange. And it's not gonna be as complicated. Is 32 tiles that form a soccer ball floating around in a big orb

[Chuck Nice]

trying to find each other.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Which is what I did for my PhD. To prove the harder problem of how could you do a big messy stochastic system, semi random system. We're just going to for the company do very pragmatic, connected, scale up.

[Chuck Nice]

There's a. I think it's called to sponsor it.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yes, yes. Or Lego.

[Chuck Nice]

I think it's called Connectix, which are. They're like. I played with those magnetic Legos, magnetite magnetiles,

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

and they're balls. So that the segment has a concave. A concave surface that can attach onto a ball so that the angle can be anything. You can make all of the polyhedra with it. Because my wife is a physicist.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We wanted to make sure that all of their toys were probes of laws, of physics. And so this magnetic connection came. Yeah, it's very cool.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I've been told that my generation was Legos, so I always say Legos with magnets, but apparently Magna tiles are the new thing for kids now, which are basically flat panels with magnets on their edges. So I wish I had come up with that toy as well.

[Chuck Nice]

You kind of did. But, you know, for the whole world.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, for the whole world. Well, we have to have you back. You live now in New York City.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I live now in New York City.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, welcome to my office here at the Hayden Planetarium. And you came when you were a kid?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

I did. I came when I was a Girl Scout in 2002 or 2003 to do a museum overnight. So we slept in your planetarium.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

In the planetarium or under the whale?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Right outside. Yeah, right outside, under the whale. But we basically got to do a tour of the planetarium, and that is what started my obsession with space. So it's kind of crazy to come.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I was a director.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow. Coming here was like a salmon swimming upstream. Came back.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Where it all begins. Where it all begins.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

So it's an honor, Neil. Thank you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, we will totally have to get you back.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And tell us where to put money.

[Chuck Nice]

How far along are we? How's that baby coming?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What trimester are you in?

[Chuck Nice]

Where's the due date on the baby?

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Chuck, I will keep you posted, I promise.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, so this has been another installment of Stark special edition. This one felt extra special, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right again, Ariel, thank you.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Thank you so much for having me

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

being on Star Talk. Neil Degrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always, keep looking up.

[Ariel Ekblaw]

Foreign.

[Gabby Windy]

Hi, I'm Gabby Windy with long winded. And I'm not gonna lie, I'm desperate. I'm desperate for your attention in any way possible. So listen to my podcast, won't you? It has great insights, exceptional humor, and plenty of pop culture to fill your dark souls. And some even say it's a great way to fall asleep due to my soothing voice. And I don't take that personally. Fall asleep A listen is a listen even when you're sleeping and a view is a view even with your eyes closed if you dare. And it doesn't take much gumption. Enjoy. Listen to Long winded Wherever you get

[Chuck Nice]

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