February 20, 2026 • 35 mins
Is building data centers in space actually feasible? It may be, thanks to Ariel Ekblaw. The scientist, VC investor and co-founder and CEO of Aurelia Institute has devoted her life to democratizing space and ensuring that humans will one day be a spacefaring species. Ariel sits down with Oz to discuss self-assembling space architecture, how science-fiction influences her inventions, and why she doesn’t think billionaires investing in space is a bad thing.
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
Welcome to tech stuff. I'mos Valoshan, and this is the
story today. I want to start with a clip from
a recent interview with Elon Musk. Five years from now,
my prediction is we will launch and be operating every
year more AI in space then m stand a cumulative
total on Earth. Five years from now, we'll have more
AI in space than on Earth. On the face of it,
(00:37):
it seems insane, but I recently met someone who painted
a compelling vision of humans as a spacefaring race, Aerial Ekplow.
She founded MIT Space Exploration Land. She's an inventor and
a space venture capital investor. Her signature project is self
assembling structures in space, essentially mag netic prefabs that drag
(01:02):
themselves into the correct configuration by magnetic attraction after they've
been shot into space. The videos of this actually working,
albeit at small scale, are quite mind blowing. An Aeriel
is planning to use this technology to build livable structures
for humans in space. But I wanted to start with
the story of the hour data centers in space, which
(01:25):
it turns out Aeriel is already working on. I wanted
to know whether AI and space to obsess billionaires could
have the right idea, the computation will be more efficient
outside our atmosphere. Take a listen.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
The first thing I think we should cover for data
centers is space is not called in the way that
people think in the context of oh, therefore it must
be easy to cool data center electronics of space. Unfortunately,
it's not that easy. In space. You don't have convective cooling.
So if you think about how data centers are cool
on Earth, you literally you flow water through something that's
(02:03):
touching close to the data center, or you flow air
through them, and it cools them down because that fluid
passing by helps.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Distribute the heat.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
It basically soaks up with the heat.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
The heat.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
In space, there's no fluid and there's no air mass,
so you don't have the same mechanism of just having
passive air or even pushed air to go through. Your
electronics mostly depend on radiative cooling, and that's hard.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
So it's not that it's better to.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Put data centers in space because space is going to
keep them cold.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
That's not the case.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
It's actually that if you're facing permitting issues on Earth
because of townships, you know, struggling with the water burden
or the grid burden, or you want to get the
carbon footprint of all of this energy from the data
centers off of Earth and into space. Space offers one
massive advantage, which is raw, unfiltered sunlight above the atmosphere,
(02:57):
so a much more efficient way to get closer to
that energy. Is it the simplest place to put a
data center?
Speaker 1 (03:02):
No?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Is it necessarily the most engineering efficient way? You know,
we could have a little argument about whether it is
or isn't. I think Elon is really arguing that it is.
There are certain aspects like radiative heat transfer that make
it difficult but not insurmountable.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
So that's kind of where we are.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
That's my overview take on AI data centers, and we
are excited for a Rendezvrou robotics one of the spinouts
that works within our ecosystem to be part of building
the self assembly capability that makes it possible to construct
something that big in or a bit.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
So you've actually been working on this problem of data
centers in space before it became yes.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Yes, because the challenge is you can't fold up something
as big as a football field and put it into
a rocket.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
That's how we do things now in space.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Right, James Web Space telescope absolutely exquisite. We fold it
up like a little toy, We squeeze it in a rocket,
which is a tiny tube. Even Starship is still small
by the comparison of what a football field would look like.
And then we try to get it to space. We
need modular tiles more like legos, think space legos, or
if you have kids listening to this podcast, magnetiles right.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
It's a very popular toy these days.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
That's the kind of modular building block that can be
packed flat in a rocket, much simpler and then self
assemble build by connecting those modules in space. I love magnets.
That's our particular approach is to use magnetic field to
do it. And so yes, we've been working even before
AI data centers were a big topical obsession. We were
working on what could be the infrastructure to support them.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
What was the moment that's happened in the last three
or four months where this went from something that you
were working on but most people hadn't heard of, to
something that everyone has an opinion about.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
I think it's the incredible drive of capital behind AI,
the need to power the hyperscalers, the ability to really
serve this growth in this incredible emerging technology domain, and
that is leading people to search for creative solutions for
where to cite energy heavy consumption data centers, and space
is one opportunity.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
And on the space technology side, the main breakthrough has
been driving down cost of getting stuff into space exactly right.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
So that's a huge that's a great point in that
Why are we considering space at all for this AI
data center play. It's because in the last fifteen years,
the cost to get to space has dropped dramatically from
about fifty thousand US dollars per kilogram in the NASA
Shuttle era, sometimes quoted even higher, to now a starship
coming online south of two hundred dollars at kilogram, which
(05:32):
is remarkable.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
That's like FedEx.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
If you can ship something around the world, you can
ship it to space. Now it's basically like cargo cost.
So that enables massive amounts of equipment like what would
be required for an AI data center to be feasibly
shipped to space with a reasonable cost.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
And this happened because of Elon.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
In many ways.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yes, I mean he's really an incredible he in SpaceX,
an incredible driving force of this reduction and launch cost
because of the invention of reusable rockets. So you can
imagine how crazy it would be if you flew in
a seven five to seven or an air bus to
Europe taken away, right, and so Elon realized this really
(06:14):
early on along with other companies like Blue Origin also
have developed a reusable rocket craft that is really the
innovation in the space industry that has achieved these remarkable
dropping costs.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
You wear a lot of hats. You founded that the
MIT Space Exploration Initiative, you run a nonprofit and correct
me if I ge any of these wrong. Book a
nonprofit space architecture lab called Aurelia Institute, which has an
associated VC fund called the Foundry. Yes, then you have
a for profit space for robotics company called Rendezvous Robotics. Yes,
that's the one that was working with the Nvidia back
(06:48):
company star Cloud on the data centersance space. Is that
comprehensive or the other has as well?
Speaker 3 (06:53):
Yes, that is comprehensive.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
But I will say the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, I
founded it, but we've had an amazing team being taking
it forward for the last few years. So my focus
is really on the Aurelia ecosystem. And that's the intersection
of the nonprofit doing space for the public good big
scale infrastructure, and the VC Fund, where we invest in
(07:15):
stuff that we spend out ourselves internally incubated companies like
Rendezvous Robotics, but we also invest in best in class
companies across the space industry like Stoke and Northwood and
Turing on Space and Lamb Division and others.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
And how do you spend your time? I mean, you've
got fundraising, You've got capital deployment, you've got pr podcasts.
Do you still do science as well? And I do, yeah, chitecture.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
I mean I try to make sure that I spend
some time with my team on a regular basis at
our fabrication facility where we are designing the prototypes of
things like self assembling tiles. So the idea behind tess Ray,
which is my mitphd thesis, is you can design a
modular tile in our their shape like hexagons and pentagons,
(08:02):
put powerful little magnets on their edges, toss them up
into space. When they're floating, the magnets pull them together.
So we work on iterative prototype development of that system.
It's now being taken forward by Rendezvous Robotics, but we
have a collaboration where we are supporting their most recent
mission with NASA that's going to fly in July of
(08:23):
this year. It's still my passion is to really do
the technical work for space hardware that's actually really going
to fly, that's going to go orbital. So I would
not want my career to take me away from that entirely.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
We'll put a link in the show notes. But there's
an amazing video like these tiles, which are basically hexagonal tiles. Yeah,
go to the International.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
Space Station, right, Yeah, they've gone twice.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
And they sort of thrown in the air and like
a magic tree, or not thrown in the air, but
they're released, yes, and like a magic tree, they find
each other and click together.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
They do.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
I know it looks really wild when you're watching it
because it's so counterintuitive from our sense of how gravity
works on Earth. But when you're in zero G, when
you're in microgravity, because you're in free fall around a planet,
when you're inside that International Space Station, Yeah, the tiles
pop together. You just release them. They fly towards each
other kind of gingerly. The tiles themselves start turning to
(09:16):
fit perfectly, and it's almost like a little ballet. It's
like someone's orchestrating them to come together, but it's autonomous.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
So they have some propulsional it's just.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
The magnets that pull them together. But once they come together,
there are little sensors that determine Hey, was that a
good neighbor or a bad neighbor?
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Was this all your idea? And how do you come
up with this?
Speaker 2 (09:33):
I was inspired by a presentation that Nary Oxman gave
when I was at MIT. So Nary Oxman is just
this absolutely stunning, inspiring architect and designer, and she gave
a class called Design Across Scales and invited Scular Tippets
from MIT to come. Skular Tippets runs the Self Assembly
Lab at MIT, and they were talking about self assembly
(09:56):
on Earth, and I knew I was sitting in this
audience thinking we should be doing this in space.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
It's so much harder to do it on the.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Ground, which is what Skyler's lab was exploring in a
bunch of really cool ways. So I was very inspired.
That was twenty sixteen, so ten years ago. It was
one of the first classes I took at MIT.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
At fast forward ten years and you're now working on
a commercial application of that for a company back by Nvidia,
which is the largest company on the ustop market. I think,
did you imagine that?
Speaker 3 (10:24):
No? Yeah, it's been incredible.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
I mean we're so happy we started ten years ago
because now it's really it's so advantageous to have this
technology ready now when the industry is ready for something
really big like this with AI data centers.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Do you think that will be the commercial application that
makes this all real for you?
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (10:43):
I think some combination of AI data centers and tennis
really large aperture arrays in orbit to improve the type
of wavelengths that you can get down to the ground basically,
so communications telecommunications. But my long term passion is habitats.
Goal is exactly It's like, I really want the long
(11:05):
term commercial success to be we are self assembling these
massive space habitats and putting.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
People in them, and what will they do when they
get there?
Speaker 2 (11:13):
In the next five years This is aggressive timeline to
hold myself to, but I think in the next five years,
maybe seven macs, we will try to put in orbit
a space orbital biolab. So the first thing it'll be
a habitat it'll be crude. But the first thing that
these humans are going to do is be scientists who
are doing tissue engineering in orbit. And the reason that's
(11:35):
so special is coming back to biology being so different
when you're floating. It turns out that things like artificial retinas.
If you tried to make an artificial retina on the
ground here where we are today, gravity will cause these
delicate little layers that you have to do to sag.
But if you're floating in space, you can get a
(11:55):
near perfect matrix of those protein layers that make the
artificial reta. So we actually are leading the investment round
in a company called Lamb Division that is making artificial
retinas in space, bringing them back down to Earth and
they would cure right now they're looking at retinitis pigmentosa,
but there's also potential for macular degeneration, so literally something
(12:18):
from space addressing blindness, which is I think such a
powerful application of space. So it's not just ten patients
who get to restore their site, but it's you know,
hundreds of thousands or millions. So that's one of the
reasons we want in orbit to buy all that.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
So as a VC investor, you're better able in theory
to take macro bets based on the development and acceleration
of the technology that would allow something that is to
actually be commercialized.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
But the way that I explain why I got into
VC because I am a scientist, Like, why did I
decide I wanted to do VC investing? There are things
I know about in the space industry. Because I've done
one hundred payloads either two space to the International Space Station,
to the Moon or on zero gravity flights. I know
what's missing. I really intimately know what the pain points are.
And the example that I usually give people is if
(13:09):
you think about ocean freight on Earth, right, it's slow,
but it's cheap and it's effective. It just gets you
across the world inside of the harbor. Once you get
to Oakland, there's a tug that moves you around where
you're supposed to go, and then there's a bunch of
last mile infrastructure. In space, we have the rockets now,
which is the ocean freight, But where are the space
(13:29):
tugs that are moving us in between orbits and doing
a bunch of kind of finer tune delivery. That's in
the space industry what we call otvs orbital transit vehicles.
Someone is going to make a shit ton of money
doing otvs and we all know that, and sometimes people
outside of the space industry wouldn't know that. So that's
a great example of I think unusual information like useful
(13:53):
knowledge from being so intimately integrated into the space industry
that helps advise our strategy as VC.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Investors love affair with space lookin for you.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
When I was a kid, I was growing up with
two Air Force pilot parents. So my dad was an
a ten fighter pilot. My mom is one of the
first women to get to fly in the United States
Air Force as a female pilot, and they raised my
brother and I to love science fiction. So they have
this service model of leadership in their mind from having
(14:23):
served the country. They love exploration and aviation, and then
they had us read all of the things that would
be the next chapter after that. So the joke is,
how do you surpass double pilot parents?
Speaker 3 (14:33):
You got to go to space. That's the only thing left.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
No pressure. Yes, were there a particular science fiction book
or movie author, short story that really gets the heart
of who you are today as a builder?
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Yes, there are two related One is Ringworld an oldie
but goody Larry Niven really stunning grand space architecture idea.
How do you build a ring world, something that is
a ring at the scale of a planet. This is
now something that is coming into the window with feasibility
(15:07):
because it's not really an open science question anymore.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
It's a question of.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Engineering, willpower and funding, and the space industry is starting
to converge around and in space economy that can make
things like this feasible in the next few decades. That's
something that has just continued to inspire me profoundly. And
then the other one is much more modern, is Neil
Stevenson's Seven Eves, And one of the things I loved
in that book is that he envisions swarms of little
(15:35):
bio inspired robots that have various critical functionalities for the
space mission. So we built a swarm robot that we
call astra Ant, an adorable little car the size of
my thumb, and we sent it to the Moon last
spring on my team. So it has sensors all over
the car so it can pick up temperature, can do
(15:55):
a camera payload, and do imaging on the Moon for
future iterations. The first one we sent was very simple,
but we're super excited now that we've developed the Astra
and we know it made it safely to the Moon.
Now we want to do a swarm deployment of these
little robots for inspection, diagnostic, and servicing.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Read out Brigotti, who writes the seven full newsletter about technology,
which I very much enjoy as do. I said something
about the SpaceX XAI combo basically like, yes, it's about
driving down costs to get rockets into space. Yes, but
it's also very much about robots. And you can't understand
this story withou understanding robots.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yes, that's so true, because I focus my life's work
around space architecture.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
I really do deeply believe why humans need to go.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
But that's not to say that they're not, you know,
profoundly supported by robots.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Why is it important for humans to go to space?
Speaker 2 (16:47):
So I have kind of a three part answer to this.
The first is just tactical, which is we learn so
much by going into space as humans that helps us
do spinoff technologies for life on Earth. So there's a
huge history of NASA, you know, kevlar microwaves, some people say,
even laser Guy's surgery. In some part from the Shuttle program,
So that's very tactical. The second is more strategic.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
So the first is a playback, use you learned something
along the way.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Yeah, you learned something along the way that you wouldn't
have learned if you didn't send a human right. The
second is strategic, which is, we need to go to space,
and we can absolutely use probes and you know, Mars
rovers and Venus flybys and things to do this. But
there's the more that we learn about, especially the near
neighborhood of our solar system, the more we understand about
(17:36):
Earth's longevity and how to plan for planetary health as
a system. So a great example of this is when
Apollo eight in nineteen I think it was nineteen sixty eight,
on Christmas Eve, flew around the Moon for the first time,
took a photo of the Earth rising above the moon,
earth rise, the opposite of moon rise that we see
(17:56):
on the Earth, and that image called earth Rise the
environmental movement in the United States. So that's an example
of space exploration when humans are involved expanding our concentric
circles of awareness as a species, and why it's kind
of so important for us as a civilization to push
out with human life in addition to to robots. I
(18:18):
don't think we'd be very satisfied as a species just
doing teleoperation and VR headset viewing of some robots.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Life on Mars.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Right, we are a species that loves knowledge. For the
sake of knowledge, we need to go.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
That was in ninety sixty eight you mentioned, Yes, is
it called the overview effect?
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Is it we now have so the image was called
earth Rise. But exactly what you're hitting on this notion
of seeing the Earth from space is that is known
as the overview effect, and it famously leads trained military
men to cry when you're in the vacuum, void darkness
of space and you look down from your precarious position
(18:55):
onto this really delicate, beautiful blue marble of a planet.
You know, Holy cow, this is really something worthy of protecting.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
And I think we.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Can use space exploration both in the science fiction notion
of let's go figure out how to live elsewhere, but
we can also use space exploration in the concept of
what we're doing at Aurelia Institute, which is space for
the public good. Do space infrastructure in lower th orbit,
like AI data centers, space based solar power, my current
(19:23):
you know, kind of flagship project, which is our orbital biolab.
Do therapeutics and bioscience that you can only do when
you're floating that you can't do on the ground. Do
that kind of stuff in space for the good of
life on Earth.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
What's the third one? That was the third one?
Speaker 3 (19:38):
That's the third one? Yeah, that's orbital biolabs.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
Yeah, things like AI data centers, space based solar power
and an orbital biolab. And that I think is what
I try to reflect in my own work, which is
think of it as really hard science science fiction. So
we are grounded in a bunch of pragmatic near term things.
I'm investing in a bunch of near term companies that
I've done my best to honestly credibly convinced my LPs
(20:02):
will give returns for an ROI focused venture fund in
the next seven years. But also what are we aimed at?
And I sometimes think that tech investing needs a little
bit more of a moral grounding or a grand aspirational grounding.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
What do you aimed at?
Speaker 2 (20:17):
What's the big picture why of why you're putting all
this money into stuff? And for me, that is where
the dreamier large scale vision comes to which is the
benefit of humanity, expanding humanity horizons and making us a
space faring species.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
After the break, the environmental costs of commercializing space and
how a space pac man might help stay with us.
How do you think about the cost? I mean, Elon
has talked about ten thousand launches a year, which I
(20:55):
think will be one an hour, and that's a lot
of a lot of gas and a lot of space.
Do all those ones come back at least is debris? Debris?
How do you think about the environmental cost of these dreams?
Speaker 2 (21:08):
This I think is a critically important topic to try
to figure out now. So currently the space industry does
not have anywhere near the carbon footprint of say aviation,
but if we succeed in getting to that ten thousand number,
we absolutely would and maybe have even a more vast impact.
So there are really important, interesting endeavors to get out
(21:29):
of this paradigm of chemical rocket propulsion as the only
way to get mass to orbit. And I do think
that that's really important is we need to do that
research now so that we have a better base on
which to stand for this growth that's coming in the industry.
But I do think people who are saying, you know
right now, oh oh dear, what is the space industry doing.
Our carbon footprint is quite small compared to aviation, so
(21:52):
we have that responsibility to take it seriously and innovate
it around it now.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
And does a debris pose a medium term risk? I mean, yeah, so.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
You're talking about the debris in orbit like space degree problem.
It certainly is.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
The diagrams that people may have seen on the news
are a little bit misleading because space is so vast.
When you make adot the size of a period on
a picture to try to indicate where the debris is
in orbit, you are marking out so much space that
it's not like the It's not as crowded or as
fuzzy as it looks on these images that people see
online that are depicting the space debris. But it is
(22:27):
serious enough that sometimes the International Space Station has had
to boost itself to avoid space debris or launch timing
is changed. Because we're tracking the debris, we have a
pretty good sense of where it is.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
But yeah, it's serious.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
We sometimes see missions that have to plan around it,
and I think one of the best things that we
could do is active remediation.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
So ESA is really motivated.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
The European Space Agency has some great programs around debris
removal companies like Astroscale or planning interesting capability. One of
my favorite ideas is to basically have a space pac
Man that goes out and you know, metaphorically eats, but
really just collects a big ball of debris until there's
enough mass in that aggregate that it starts to be
(23:10):
dragged down in orbit a little bit lower in altitude,
and then it hits the atmosphere, hits drag and then
burns up on reentry. So it's like a trash collector
for space, little pac Man. So and not to end
on a lighthearted note for a very serious problem, but yes,
I do think that space debris is something to contend
with and there are a lot of interesting endeavors that
are looking at that Right now.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
To remediate I.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Want to understand a little bit more about your vision
for space habitats, and one of the things I was
very intrigued by is that you asked a lot of
astronauts what their experience of space was like and how
it could be better. Yes, what did you learn from
those conversations?
Speaker 2 (23:45):
So this is credit to my amazing co founder, Sana Sharma,
who was a friend of mine in undergrad at Yale
and then is an amazing designer. She has run this
astronaut ethnography program.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
Yeah, three MD.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
What an incredible privilege, we know, we have to be
an MIT and get the chance to talk to so
many astronauts. And she interviewed astronauts from around the world,
so not just NASA astronauts, but you know, from different nationalities,
from private spaceflight participants who are not government agency trained astronauts,
but as individuals who went and she asked them questions
(24:20):
that they either don't get asked by NASA when they're debriefed,
or they get asked by NASA but are never made public,
which are things like what is the most uncomfortable part
of living in space? What was the most disgusting experience
that you had, What was the most profound, beautiful, heart
you know, expanding experience that you had. And in particular,
(24:40):
she focused in on comfort and care, which is something
that is not a combination often considered in today's space
habitats because they're mostly occupied by unbelievably qualified, diligent, disciplined
individuals top you know, points zervisors or a one percent
of human talent. If we're going to start well more
(25:00):
people into the space industry, into our Aurelia Tessay space habitats,
we have to design the interiors so that they're delightful
and that they don't just look like a science lab.
One of Sauna's favorite quotes from her program is that
an astronaut said, life in space on the International Space
Station is like sleeping under your desk in the lab.
You know, like that, and it's amazing. Many people would
(25:22):
give up their whole career to get to go do that.
But it doesn't work for everybody, and we want space
to work for everybody as much as we can. Right
people often ask, oh, what if you have health issues,
can you still go to space? Actually, many more health
issues than you might think. You can absolutely still go
to space. We just wouldn't put you in a position
where you're going to be there for six months or
a year. And Sauna's work, I think has really profoundly
(25:45):
inspired and informed how we think about interior design, architecture,
and comfort and care in those next generation habitats that
we're building.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
It's pretty interesting because there was a New York Times
magazine story last year that I was fascinated by about
this fake Moon surface or no Mars surface called Mars Asterisk,
And basically they recruited all these people to go and
live on Mars in an analog in an analog for
like five hundred days. And the article was basically about
(26:14):
how the experiment was essentially designed to psychologically torture the
people and see how much they could withstand it. There
was no like, there's nothing beyond that really inherent in
the expedition, and I found it quite kind of depressing,
honestly to read. So it'sic. It's actually nice to hear
an alternative vision that space could be fun than whimsical
and comfortable.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
And comfortable and empowering.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, when you go again, we're standing on the shoulders
of giants here because we have to make it safe
first and foremost.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
That unlocks the ability.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
To then think about what if you didn't just have
to survive in space, but you could thrive in space.
And we've built a nearly thirty foot markup of our
Tessa Ray space habitat. We've exhibited it around a ted
To Seattle Museum of Flight. When you walk into it,
we have things like a zero gravity kitchen, What does
it mean to do fermentation like sour dough or kimchi bubbling?
Speaker 3 (27:06):
In space?
Speaker 2 (27:07):
We have an algae stained glass window. The algae is
inside of these panels where it gets some light from
the outside, so you can actually grow the algae like cyanobacteria,
and then have the algae, in partnership with the bacteria
produce something useful for the habitat, like oxygen, and that
would supplement the life support system. So it's both pragmatic
(27:30):
and functional, but also hopefully beautiful and stunning.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
So take me from where we are today to people
being inside these environments in space. Well, maybe take me
back from people being in the environers in space to
where we are today, because here are some of the
problems that come to mind. Or I guess. Scale is
one thing, I guess, the reliability of the parts connecting
(27:56):
successfully is one thing. I guess, the maintenance is another yep.
And the challenge of getting people to and from that's
already been solved. Essentially is the same docking technology you've
used on the Percise.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Well, actually some combination of ISS and SpaceX. So we
will try to be as agnostic as possible. We are
going to have to pick a standard. But exactly to
your point, we are lucky in that we're not having
to be the rocket transportation. We're gonna, you know, leverage
the SpaceX delivery or other companies that'll be able to
come and dock. And I do think for that five
year timeframe that I gave you five to seven years
(28:28):
for an orbital bio lab, most likely that will be
us self assembling this module and attaching it to one
of the commercial space stations that are getting built that
not very many people know about. More people should know
about these that will be the replacement to the International
Space Station. So the ISS has been up since the
(28:48):
I think it was like maybe completed the design in
nineteen ninety eight, flew in early two thousand, so over
twenty years.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
It's old.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
It's like any home. It really desperately needs a reno.
And what NASA has decided is that we're going to
decommission the International Space Station. NASA has been incentivizing a
range of for profit companies to build their own commercial
space stations in orbit. They will be basically the follow
on to the ISS, and then we would like to
(29:15):
assemble and then attach our tests array self assembling module
if it's an normal to biolab attach it to one
of these providers like Axiom or Vast or Voyager star Lab,
who are going to be these next future commercial space stations.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Do you have absolute confidence that you will go to
space in one of your tessay assembled domes?
Speaker 2 (29:39):
I better, Yes, I think I certainly have the courage
and the desire to go. I think there's nothing worse
than an architect that doesn't live and inhabit their own space.
So yes, I do think I'm bullish on the fact
that in my lifetime I will get a chance to
build one of these designs to human occupancy rating and
hopefully go myself.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
Yes, just before we close. And I know this idea
of democratizing space is something which is motivating for you.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
On the other hand, many people feel like space is
becoming more of a colonial environment than a democratic environment,
whether it's you know, obviously US China space conflict, or
you know Elon and Jeff Bezos who are seen by
many as oligarchs who are trying to do a land
grab in space. And so those are people who you
(30:30):
work with, either directly or indirectly, whose platform technologies enabled
what you're doing, but his goals may not be the
same as yours.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Such a point, I would say, I'm actually really grateful
to SpaceX and Blue Origin for what they're doing. I
don't view it so much as oligarchs as I view
it as it's like the beginning of commercial air travel
in the nineteen forties and fifties, where initially it was
a very expensive only military activity. Then it became a
(30:59):
commercial activity, but it was a luxury activity, and then
over time the costs dropped and it became this incredibly
empowering opportunity where you and I as not particularly crazy
fancy people get to hop on a plane goal around
the world.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
That is the progression that Elon and really.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
To give credit to Gwen shot well as well at
SpaceX and Blue Origin and Bezos and many other companies.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
That's what they're trying to achieve.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
And I think the media has hit on this notion
of oh, it's just the high net worth individuals going
to space, because they cover Richard Branson going and Bezos going.
But these gentlemen and their companies, if their companies are
going to succeed, they have to scale to democratize access
to space. That's where the customers really come from. So
I think in the long term their incentives are aligned
(31:44):
with one of my goals, which is how do we
democratize access to space for my other mission elements in
the nonprofit where we want to think about are we
being good stewards of the space commons, How can we
make sure that we don't contribute to space debris, How
can we be a little thoughtful about precedent setting on
the Moon, maybe avoiding strict ownership and competition and potential
(32:05):
geopolitical conflict. I think that there is a role for
a nonprofit like us to do interesting thought leadership, to
try to shape the future of space, to be principled
and inclusive and exciting, so that more people like my dad.
My dad was born in the fifties. He when he
was a kid, saw the Moon landing and was convinced
(32:25):
than in his lifetime he would get to go. We
had this interregnum where because we lost funding with the
Cold War, we stopped investing in space as heavily. This
time I think will be profoundly different because we have
an economy that's fueled by these companies that you mentioned,
making it possible for truly like if there are people
listening to this podcast that have kids, for your kids
(32:46):
to commute to space for work in the next ten years.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Just to press you, there is also a darker potentiality, right,
And going back to our friend read Albergotti, he wrote
in his that news letter the nineteen sixty seven how
to Space Treaty make space subject international law, but in
more recent US law allows companies to keep what they mind.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Out there artmiss records, yep, and.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Will eventually it will mean a borderless internet and an
industrial supply chain that is beyond the reach or control
of any country. Science fiction has plenty of warnings for
what these companies might look like.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yes, that's true.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
One of the things we're we've thought about in the
context of policy for the Moon, for example, is how
do we avoid a mill town and the exploitativeness of
a mill town. So if you remember milltown's where the
company store basically owns all of the employees and they're exploitative,
it's hard for them to leave. You can imagine some
company operating on the Moon decides that they own your
(33:42):
air because they transported you there as an employee, and
you can't just walk outside and go home.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
You'd have to be dependent on them to get back
to Earth.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
There's all these different potentials that you know, the Summer
four article and comment hits on, and I think one
of the jobs of creators of this technology like us,
is to say, let's work on some combination of technological
solutions that mitigate some of the risks like space debris
or green propulsion for the carbon footprint. Let's also work
(34:10):
on policy frameworks and regulatory frameworks that seed in some
of the values that we care about in an open
and free society. We don't have to give up and say,
oh man, it's just going to be a gold rush
and we're going to let the Moon be chopped up
and be treated in a way that seeds these dystopian futures.
It really is a moment to say, this is our responsibility,
(34:32):
this is the time. Let's do some regulatory and policy
work to try to put a better future in place.
And I think that that is something we certainly work
on at Aurralia Institute. There are amazing groups like Open
Lunar Foundation that are also looking at this. We're certainly
not alone in it, but it is I think worthy
of you pressing me on because now is the time
(34:53):
to figure that out in a principled fashion and not
wait to see how it plays out and then try to.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Fix it later. Area con think of a better place
to and thank you.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Thank you so much. It is a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
That's it for tech Stuff this week. I'm Osvo Looshian.
This episode was produced by Elisa Dennis and Melissa Slaughter.
It was executive produced by me Karen Price, Julian Nutter,
and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina norvelve iHeart Podcasts.
The engineer is Kathleen Conti and Jack Insley makes this episode.
Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Please do rate, review,
(35:35):
and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at
gmail dot com.
Welcome to tech stuff. I'mos Valoshan, and this is the
story today. I want to start with a clip from
a recent interview with Elon Musk. Five years from now,
my prediction is we will launch and be operating every
year more AI in space then m stand a cumulative
total on Earth. Five years from now, we'll have more
AI in space than on Earth. On the face of it,
(00:37):
it seems insane, but I recently met someone who painted
a compelling vision of humans as a spacefaring race, Aerial Ekplow.
She founded MIT Space Exploration Land. She's an inventor and
a space venture capital investor. Her signature project is self
assembling structures in space, essentially mag netic prefabs that drag
(01:02):
themselves into the correct configuration by magnetic attraction after they've
been shot into space. The videos of this actually working,
albeit at small scale, are quite mind blowing. An Aeriel
is planning to use this technology to build livable structures
for humans in space. But I wanted to start with
the story of the hour data centers in space, which
(01:25):
it turns out Aeriel is already working on. I wanted
to know whether AI and space to obsess billionaires could
have the right idea, the computation will be more efficient
outside our atmosphere. Take a listen.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
The first thing I think we should cover for data
centers is space is not called in the way that
people think in the context of oh, therefore it must
be easy to cool data center electronics of space. Unfortunately,
it's not that easy. In space. You don't have convective cooling.
So if you think about how data centers are cool
on Earth, you literally you flow water through something that's
(02:03):
touching close to the data center, or you flow air
through them, and it cools them down because that fluid
passing by helps.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Distribute the heat.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
It basically soaks up with the heat.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
The heat.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
In space, there's no fluid and there's no air mass,
so you don't have the same mechanism of just having
passive air or even pushed air to go through. Your
electronics mostly depend on radiative cooling, and that's hard.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
So it's not that it's better to.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Put data centers in space because space is going to
keep them cold.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
That's not the case.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
It's actually that if you're facing permitting issues on Earth
because of townships, you know, struggling with the water burden
or the grid burden, or you want to get the
carbon footprint of all of this energy from the data
centers off of Earth and into space. Space offers one
massive advantage, which is raw, unfiltered sunlight above the atmosphere,
(02:57):
so a much more efficient way to get closer to
that energy. Is it the simplest place to put a
data center?
Speaker 1 (03:02):
No?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Is it necessarily the most engineering efficient way? You know,
we could have a little argument about whether it is
or isn't. I think Elon is really arguing that it is.
There are certain aspects like radiative heat transfer that make
it difficult but not insurmountable.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
So that's kind of where we are.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
That's my overview take on AI data centers, and we
are excited for a Rendezvrou robotics one of the spinouts
that works within our ecosystem to be part of building
the self assembly capability that makes it possible to construct
something that big in or a bit.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
So you've actually been working on this problem of data
centers in space before it became yes.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Yes, because the challenge is you can't fold up something
as big as a football field and put it into
a rocket.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
That's how we do things now in space.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Right, James Web Space telescope absolutely exquisite. We fold it
up like a little toy, We squeeze it in a rocket,
which is a tiny tube. Even Starship is still small
by the comparison of what a football field would look like.
And then we try to get it to space. We
need modular tiles more like legos, think space legos, or
if you have kids listening to this podcast, magnetiles right.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
It's a very popular toy these days.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
That's the kind of modular building block that can be
packed flat in a rocket, much simpler and then self
assemble build by connecting those modules in space. I love magnets.
That's our particular approach is to use magnetic field to
do it. And so yes, we've been working even before
AI data centers were a big topical obsession. We were
working on what could be the infrastructure to support them.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
What was the moment that's happened in the last three
or four months where this went from something that you
were working on but most people hadn't heard of, to
something that everyone has an opinion about.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
I think it's the incredible drive of capital behind AI,
the need to power the hyperscalers, the ability to really
serve this growth in this incredible emerging technology domain, and
that is leading people to search for creative solutions for
where to cite energy heavy consumption data centers, and space
is one opportunity.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
And on the space technology side, the main breakthrough has
been driving down cost of getting stuff into space exactly right.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
So that's a huge that's a great point in that
Why are we considering space at all for this AI
data center play. It's because in the last fifteen years,
the cost to get to space has dropped dramatically from
about fifty thousand US dollars per kilogram in the NASA
Shuttle era, sometimes quoted even higher, to now a starship
coming online south of two hundred dollars at kilogram, which
(05:32):
is remarkable.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
That's like FedEx.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
If you can ship something around the world, you can
ship it to space. Now it's basically like cargo cost.
So that enables massive amounts of equipment like what would
be required for an AI data center to be feasibly
shipped to space with a reasonable cost.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
And this happened because of Elon.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
In many ways.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yes, I mean he's really an incredible he in SpaceX,
an incredible driving force of this reduction and launch cost
because of the invention of reusable rockets. So you can
imagine how crazy it would be if you flew in
a seven five to seven or an air bus to
Europe taken away, right, and so Elon realized this really
(06:14):
early on along with other companies like Blue Origin also
have developed a reusable rocket craft that is really the
innovation in the space industry that has achieved these remarkable
dropping costs.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
You wear a lot of hats. You founded that the
MIT Space Exploration Initiative, you run a nonprofit and correct
me if I ge any of these wrong. Book a
nonprofit space architecture lab called Aurelia Institute, which has an
associated VC fund called the Foundry. Yes, then you have
a for profit space for robotics company called Rendezvous Robotics. Yes,
that's the one that was working with the Nvidia back
(06:48):
company star Cloud on the data centersance space. Is that
comprehensive or the other has as well?
Speaker 3 (06:53):
Yes, that is comprehensive.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
But I will say the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, I
founded it, but we've had an amazing team being taking
it forward for the last few years. So my focus
is really on the Aurelia ecosystem. And that's the intersection
of the nonprofit doing space for the public good big
scale infrastructure, and the VC Fund, where we invest in
(07:15):
stuff that we spend out ourselves internally incubated companies like
Rendezvous Robotics, but we also invest in best in class
companies across the space industry like Stoke and Northwood and
Turing on Space and Lamb Division and others.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
And how do you spend your time? I mean, you've
got fundraising, You've got capital deployment, you've got pr podcasts.
Do you still do science as well? And I do, yeah, chitecture.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
I mean I try to make sure that I spend
some time with my team on a regular basis at
our fabrication facility where we are designing the prototypes of
things like self assembling tiles. So the idea behind tess Ray,
which is my mitphd thesis, is you can design a
modular tile in our their shape like hexagons and pentagons,
(08:02):
put powerful little magnets on their edges, toss them up
into space. When they're floating, the magnets pull them together.
So we work on iterative prototype development of that system.
It's now being taken forward by Rendezvous Robotics, but we
have a collaboration where we are supporting their most recent
mission with NASA that's going to fly in July of
(08:23):
this year. It's still my passion is to really do
the technical work for space hardware that's actually really going
to fly, that's going to go orbital. So I would
not want my career to take me away from that entirely.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
We'll put a link in the show notes. But there's
an amazing video like these tiles, which are basically hexagonal tiles. Yeah,
go to the International.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
Space Station, right, Yeah, they've gone twice.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
And they sort of thrown in the air and like
a magic tree, or not thrown in the air, but
they're released, yes, and like a magic tree, they find
each other and click together.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
They do.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
I know it looks really wild when you're watching it
because it's so counterintuitive from our sense of how gravity
works on Earth. But when you're in zero G, when
you're in microgravity, because you're in free fall around a planet,
when you're inside that International Space Station, Yeah, the tiles
pop together. You just release them. They fly towards each
other kind of gingerly. The tiles themselves start turning to
(09:16):
fit perfectly, and it's almost like a little ballet. It's
like someone's orchestrating them to come together, but it's autonomous.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
So they have some propulsional it's just.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
The magnets that pull them together. But once they come together,
there are little sensors that determine Hey, was that a
good neighbor or a bad neighbor?
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Was this all your idea? And how do you come
up with this?
Speaker 2 (09:33):
I was inspired by a presentation that Nary Oxman gave
when I was at MIT. So Nary Oxman is just
this absolutely stunning, inspiring architect and designer, and she gave
a class called Design Across Scales and invited Scular Tippets
from MIT to come. Skular Tippets runs the Self Assembly
Lab at MIT, and they were talking about self assembly
(09:56):
on Earth, and I knew I was sitting in this
audience thinking we should be doing this in space.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
It's so much harder to do it on the.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Ground, which is what Skyler's lab was exploring in a
bunch of really cool ways. So I was very inspired.
That was twenty sixteen, so ten years ago. It was
one of the first classes I took at MIT.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
At fast forward ten years and you're now working on
a commercial application of that for a company back by Nvidia,
which is the largest company on the ustop market. I think,
did you imagine that?
Speaker 3 (10:24):
No? Yeah, it's been incredible.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
I mean we're so happy we started ten years ago
because now it's really it's so advantageous to have this
technology ready now when the industry is ready for something
really big like this with AI data centers.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Do you think that will be the commercial application that
makes this all real for you?
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (10:43):
I think some combination of AI data centers and tennis
really large aperture arrays in orbit to improve the type
of wavelengths that you can get down to the ground basically,
so communications telecommunications. But my long term passion is habitats.
Goal is exactly It's like, I really want the long
(11:05):
term commercial success to be we are self assembling these
massive space habitats and putting.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
People in them, and what will they do when they
get there?
Speaker 2 (11:13):
In the next five years This is aggressive timeline to
hold myself to, but I think in the next five years,
maybe seven macs, we will try to put in orbit
a space orbital biolab. So the first thing it'll be
a habitat it'll be crude. But the first thing that
these humans are going to do is be scientists who
are doing tissue engineering in orbit. And the reason that's
(11:35):
so special is coming back to biology being so different
when you're floating. It turns out that things like artificial retinas.
If you tried to make an artificial retina on the
ground here where we are today, gravity will cause these
delicate little layers that you have to do to sag.
But if you're floating in space, you can get a
(11:55):
near perfect matrix of those protein layers that make the
artificial reta. So we actually are leading the investment round
in a company called Lamb Division that is making artificial
retinas in space, bringing them back down to Earth and
they would cure right now they're looking at retinitis pigmentosa,
but there's also potential for macular degeneration, so literally something
(12:18):
from space addressing blindness, which is I think such a
powerful application of space. So it's not just ten patients
who get to restore their site, but it's you know,
hundreds of thousands or millions. So that's one of the
reasons we want in orbit to buy all that.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
So as a VC investor, you're better able in theory
to take macro bets based on the development and acceleration
of the technology that would allow something that is to
actually be commercialized.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
But the way that I explain why I got into
VC because I am a scientist, Like, why did I
decide I wanted to do VC investing? There are things
I know about in the space industry. Because I've done
one hundred payloads either two space to the International Space Station,
to the Moon or on zero gravity flights. I know
what's missing. I really intimately know what the pain points are.
And the example that I usually give people is if
(13:09):
you think about ocean freight on Earth, right, it's slow,
but it's cheap and it's effective. It just gets you
across the world inside of the harbor. Once you get
to Oakland, there's a tug that moves you around where
you're supposed to go, and then there's a bunch of
last mile infrastructure. In space, we have the rockets now,
which is the ocean freight, But where are the space
(13:29):
tugs that are moving us in between orbits and doing
a bunch of kind of finer tune delivery. That's in
the space industry what we call otvs orbital transit vehicles.
Someone is going to make a shit ton of money
doing otvs and we all know that, and sometimes people
outside of the space industry wouldn't know that. So that's
a great example of I think unusual information like useful
(13:53):
knowledge from being so intimately integrated into the space industry
that helps advise our strategy as VC.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Investors love affair with space lookin for you.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
When I was a kid, I was growing up with
two Air Force pilot parents. So my dad was an
a ten fighter pilot. My mom is one of the
first women to get to fly in the United States
Air Force as a female pilot, and they raised my
brother and I to love science fiction. So they have
this service model of leadership in their mind from having
(14:23):
served the country. They love exploration and aviation, and then
they had us read all of the things that would
be the next chapter after that. So the joke is,
how do you surpass double pilot parents?
Speaker 3 (14:33):
You got to go to space. That's the only thing left.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
No pressure. Yes, were there a particular science fiction book
or movie author, short story that really gets the heart
of who you are today as a builder?
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Yes, there are two related One is Ringworld an oldie
but goody Larry Niven really stunning grand space architecture idea.
How do you build a ring world, something that is
a ring at the scale of a planet. This is
now something that is coming into the window with feasibility
(15:07):
because it's not really an open science question anymore.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
It's a question of.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Engineering, willpower and funding, and the space industry is starting
to converge around and in space economy that can make
things like this feasible in the next few decades. That's
something that has just continued to inspire me profoundly. And
then the other one is much more modern, is Neil
Stevenson's Seven Eves, And one of the things I loved
in that book is that he envisions swarms of little
(15:35):
bio inspired robots that have various critical functionalities for the
space mission. So we built a swarm robot that we
call astra Ant, an adorable little car the size of
my thumb, and we sent it to the Moon last
spring on my team. So it has sensors all over
the car so it can pick up temperature, can do
(15:55):
a camera payload, and do imaging on the Moon for
future iterations. The first one we sent was very simple,
but we're super excited now that we've developed the Astra
and we know it made it safely to the Moon.
Now we want to do a swarm deployment of these
little robots for inspection, diagnostic, and servicing.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Read out Brigotti, who writes the seven full newsletter about technology,
which I very much enjoy as do. I said something
about the SpaceX XAI combo basically like, yes, it's about
driving down costs to get rockets into space. Yes, but
it's also very much about robots. And you can't understand
this story withou understanding robots.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yes, that's so true, because I focus my life's work
around space architecture.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
I really do deeply believe why humans need to go.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
But that's not to say that they're not, you know,
profoundly supported by robots.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Why is it important for humans to go to space?
Speaker 2 (16:47):
So I have kind of a three part answer to this.
The first is just tactical, which is we learn so
much by going into space as humans that helps us
do spinoff technologies for life on Earth. So there's a
huge history of NASA, you know, kevlar microwaves, some people say,
even laser Guy's surgery. In some part from the Shuttle program,
So that's very tactical. The second is more strategic.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
So the first is a playback, use you learned something
along the way.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Yeah, you learned something along the way that you wouldn't
have learned if you didn't send a human right. The
second is strategic, which is, we need to go to space,
and we can absolutely use probes and you know, Mars
rovers and Venus flybys and things to do this. But
there's the more that we learn about, especially the near
neighborhood of our solar system, the more we understand about
(17:36):
Earth's longevity and how to plan for planetary health as
a system. So a great example of this is when
Apollo eight in nineteen I think it was nineteen sixty eight,
on Christmas Eve, flew around the Moon for the first time,
took a photo of the Earth rising above the moon,
earth rise, the opposite of moon rise that we see
(17:56):
on the Earth, and that image called earth Rise the
environmental movement in the United States. So that's an example
of space exploration when humans are involved expanding our concentric
circles of awareness as a species, and why it's kind
of so important for us as a civilization to push
out with human life in addition to to robots. I
(18:18):
don't think we'd be very satisfied as a species just
doing teleoperation and VR headset viewing of some robots.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Life on Mars.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Right, we are a species that loves knowledge. For the
sake of knowledge, we need to go.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
That was in ninety sixty eight you mentioned, Yes, is
it called the overview effect?
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Is it we now have so the image was called
earth Rise. But exactly what you're hitting on this notion
of seeing the Earth from space is that is known
as the overview effect, and it famously leads trained military
men to cry when you're in the vacuum, void darkness
of space and you look down from your precarious position
(18:55):
onto this really delicate, beautiful blue marble of a planet.
You know, Holy cow, this is really something worthy of protecting.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
And I think we.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Can use space exploration both in the science fiction notion
of let's go figure out how to live elsewhere, but
we can also use space exploration in the concept of
what we're doing at Aurelia Institute, which is space for
the public good. Do space infrastructure in lower th orbit,
like AI data centers, space based solar power, my current
(19:23):
you know, kind of flagship project, which is our orbital biolab.
Do therapeutics and bioscience that you can only do when
you're floating that you can't do on the ground. Do
that kind of stuff in space for the good of
life on Earth.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
What's the third one? That was the third one?
Speaker 3 (19:38):
That's the third one? Yeah, that's orbital biolabs.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
Yeah, things like AI data centers, space based solar power
and an orbital biolab. And that I think is what
I try to reflect in my own work, which is
think of it as really hard science science fiction. So
we are grounded in a bunch of pragmatic near term things.
I'm investing in a bunch of near term companies that
I've done my best to honestly credibly convinced my LPs
(20:02):
will give returns for an ROI focused venture fund in
the next seven years. But also what are we aimed at?
And I sometimes think that tech investing needs a little
bit more of a moral grounding or a grand aspirational grounding.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
What do you aimed at?
Speaker 2 (20:17):
What's the big picture why of why you're putting all
this money into stuff? And for me, that is where
the dreamier large scale vision comes to which is the
benefit of humanity, expanding humanity horizons and making us a
space faring species.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
After the break, the environmental costs of commercializing space and
how a space pac man might help stay with us.
How do you think about the cost? I mean, Elon
has talked about ten thousand launches a year, which I
(20:55):
think will be one an hour, and that's a lot
of a lot of gas and a lot of space.
Do all those ones come back at least is debris? Debris?
How do you think about the environmental cost of these dreams?
Speaker 2 (21:08):
This I think is a critically important topic to try
to figure out now. So currently the space industry does
not have anywhere near the carbon footprint of say aviation,
but if we succeed in getting to that ten thousand number,
we absolutely would and maybe have even a more vast impact.
So there are really important, interesting endeavors to get out
(21:29):
of this paradigm of chemical rocket propulsion as the only
way to get mass to orbit. And I do think
that that's really important is we need to do that
research now so that we have a better base on
which to stand for this growth that's coming in the industry.
But I do think people who are saying, you know
right now, oh oh dear, what is the space industry doing.
Our carbon footprint is quite small compared to aviation, so
(21:52):
we have that responsibility to take it seriously and innovate
it around it now.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
And does a debris pose a medium term risk? I mean, yeah, so.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
You're talking about the debris in orbit like space degree problem.
It certainly is.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
The diagrams that people may have seen on the news
are a little bit misleading because space is so vast.
When you make adot the size of a period on
a picture to try to indicate where the debris is
in orbit, you are marking out so much space that
it's not like the It's not as crowded or as
fuzzy as it looks on these images that people see
online that are depicting the space debris. But it is
(22:27):
serious enough that sometimes the International Space Station has had
to boost itself to avoid space debris or launch timing
is changed. Because we're tracking the debris, we have a
pretty good sense of where it is.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
But yeah, it's serious.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
We sometimes see missions that have to plan around it,
and I think one of the best things that we
could do is active remediation.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
So ESA is really motivated.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
The European Space Agency has some great programs around debris
removal companies like Astroscale or planning interesting capability. One of
my favorite ideas is to basically have a space pac
Man that goes out and you know, metaphorically eats, but
really just collects a big ball of debris until there's
enough mass in that aggregate that it starts to be
(23:10):
dragged down in orbit a little bit lower in altitude,
and then it hits the atmosphere, hits drag and then
burns up on reentry. So it's like a trash collector
for space, little pac Man. So and not to end
on a lighthearted note for a very serious problem, but yes,
I do think that space debris is something to contend
with and there are a lot of interesting endeavors that
are looking at that Right now.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
To remediate I.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Want to understand a little bit more about your vision
for space habitats, and one of the things I was
very intrigued by is that you asked a lot of
astronauts what their experience of space was like and how
it could be better. Yes, what did you learn from
those conversations?
Speaker 2 (23:45):
So this is credit to my amazing co founder, Sana Sharma,
who was a friend of mine in undergrad at Yale
and then is an amazing designer. She has run this
astronaut ethnography program.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
Yeah, three MD.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
What an incredible privilege, we know, we have to be
an MIT and get the chance to talk to so
many astronauts. And she interviewed astronauts from around the world,
so not just NASA astronauts, but you know, from different nationalities,
from private spaceflight participants who are not government agency trained astronauts,
but as individuals who went and she asked them questions
(24:20):
that they either don't get asked by NASA when they're debriefed,
or they get asked by NASA but are never made public,
which are things like what is the most uncomfortable part
of living in space? What was the most disgusting experience
that you had, What was the most profound, beautiful, heart
you know, expanding experience that you had. And in particular,
(24:40):
she focused in on comfort and care, which is something
that is not a combination often considered in today's space
habitats because they're mostly occupied by unbelievably qualified, diligent, disciplined
individuals top you know, points zervisors or a one percent
of human talent. If we're going to start well more
(25:00):
people into the space industry, into our Aurelia Tessay space habitats,
we have to design the interiors so that they're delightful
and that they don't just look like a science lab.
One of Sauna's favorite quotes from her program is that
an astronaut said, life in space on the International Space
Station is like sleeping under your desk in the lab.
You know, like that, and it's amazing. Many people would
(25:22):
give up their whole career to get to go do that.
But it doesn't work for everybody, and we want space
to work for everybody as much as we can. Right
people often ask, oh, what if you have health issues,
can you still go to space? Actually, many more health
issues than you might think. You can absolutely still go
to space. We just wouldn't put you in a position
where you're going to be there for six months or
a year. And Sauna's work, I think has really profoundly
(25:45):
inspired and informed how we think about interior design, architecture,
and comfort and care in those next generation habitats that
we're building.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
It's pretty interesting because there was a New York Times
magazine story last year that I was fascinated by about
this fake Moon surface or no Mars surface called Mars Asterisk,
And basically they recruited all these people to go and
live on Mars in an analog in an analog for
like five hundred days. And the article was basically about
(26:14):
how the experiment was essentially designed to psychologically torture the
people and see how much they could withstand it. There
was no like, there's nothing beyond that really inherent in
the expedition, and I found it quite kind of depressing,
honestly to read. So it'sic. It's actually nice to hear
an alternative vision that space could be fun than whimsical
and comfortable.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
And comfortable and empowering.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, when you go again, we're standing on the shoulders
of giants here because we have to make it safe
first and foremost.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
That unlocks the ability.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
To then think about what if you didn't just have
to survive in space, but you could thrive in space.
And we've built a nearly thirty foot markup of our
Tessa Ray space habitat. We've exhibited it around a ted
To Seattle Museum of Flight. When you walk into it,
we have things like a zero gravity kitchen, What does
it mean to do fermentation like sour dough or kimchi bubbling?
Speaker 3 (27:06):
In space?
Speaker 2 (27:07):
We have an algae stained glass window. The algae is
inside of these panels where it gets some light from
the outside, so you can actually grow the algae like cyanobacteria,
and then have the algae, in partnership with the bacteria
produce something useful for the habitat, like oxygen, and that
would supplement the life support system. So it's both pragmatic
(27:30):
and functional, but also hopefully beautiful and stunning.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
So take me from where we are today to people
being inside these environments in space. Well, maybe take me
back from people being in the environers in space to
where we are today, because here are some of the
problems that come to mind. Or I guess. Scale is
one thing, I guess, the reliability of the parts connecting
(27:56):
successfully is one thing. I guess, the maintenance is another yep.
And the challenge of getting people to and from that's
already been solved. Essentially is the same docking technology you've
used on the Percise.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Well, actually some combination of ISS and SpaceX. So we
will try to be as agnostic as possible. We are
going to have to pick a standard. But exactly to
your point, we are lucky in that we're not having
to be the rocket transportation. We're gonna, you know, leverage
the SpaceX delivery or other companies that'll be able to
come and dock. And I do think for that five
year timeframe that I gave you five to seven years
(28:28):
for an orbital bio lab, most likely that will be
us self assembling this module and attaching it to one
of the commercial space stations that are getting built that
not very many people know about. More people should know
about these that will be the replacement to the International
Space Station. So the ISS has been up since the
(28:48):
I think it was like maybe completed the design in
nineteen ninety eight, flew in early two thousand, so over
twenty years.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
It's old.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
It's like any home. It really desperately needs a reno.
And what NASA has decided is that we're going to
decommission the International Space Station. NASA has been incentivizing a
range of for profit companies to build their own commercial
space stations in orbit. They will be basically the follow
on to the ISS, and then we would like to
(29:15):
assemble and then attach our tests array self assembling module
if it's an normal to biolab attach it to one
of these providers like Axiom or Vast or Voyager star Lab,
who are going to be these next future commercial space stations.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Do you have absolute confidence that you will go to
space in one of your tessay assembled domes?
Speaker 2 (29:39):
I better, Yes, I think I certainly have the courage
and the desire to go. I think there's nothing worse
than an architect that doesn't live and inhabit their own space.
So yes, I do think I'm bullish on the fact
that in my lifetime I will get a chance to
build one of these designs to human occupancy rating and
hopefully go myself.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
Yes, just before we close. And I know this idea
of democratizing space is something which is motivating for you.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
On the other hand, many people feel like space is
becoming more of a colonial environment than a democratic environment,
whether it's you know, obviously US China space conflict, or
you know Elon and Jeff Bezos who are seen by
many as oligarchs who are trying to do a land
grab in space. And so those are people who you
(30:30):
work with, either directly or indirectly, whose platform technologies enabled
what you're doing, but his goals may not be the
same as yours.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Such a point, I would say, I'm actually really grateful
to SpaceX and Blue Origin for what they're doing. I
don't view it so much as oligarchs as I view
it as it's like the beginning of commercial air travel
in the nineteen forties and fifties, where initially it was
a very expensive only military activity. Then it became a
(30:59):
commercial activity, but it was a luxury activity, and then
over time the costs dropped and it became this incredibly
empowering opportunity where you and I as not particularly crazy
fancy people get to hop on a plane goal around
the world.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
That is the progression that Elon and really.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
To give credit to Gwen shot well as well at
SpaceX and Blue Origin and Bezos and many other companies.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
That's what they're trying to achieve.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
And I think the media has hit on this notion
of oh, it's just the high net worth individuals going
to space, because they cover Richard Branson going and Bezos going.
But these gentlemen and their companies, if their companies are
going to succeed, they have to scale to democratize access
to space. That's where the customers really come from. So
I think in the long term their incentives are aligned
(31:44):
with one of my goals, which is how do we
democratize access to space for my other mission elements in
the nonprofit where we want to think about are we
being good stewards of the space commons, How can we
make sure that we don't contribute to space debris, How
can we be a little thoughtful about precedent setting on
the Moon, maybe avoiding strict ownership and competition and potential
(32:05):
geopolitical conflict. I think that there is a role for
a nonprofit like us to do interesting thought leadership, to
try to shape the future of space, to be principled
and inclusive and exciting, so that more people like my dad.
My dad was born in the fifties. He when he
was a kid, saw the Moon landing and was convinced
(32:25):
than in his lifetime he would get to go. We
had this interregnum where because we lost funding with the
Cold War, we stopped investing in space as heavily. This
time I think will be profoundly different because we have
an economy that's fueled by these companies that you mentioned,
making it possible for truly like if there are people
listening to this podcast that have kids, for your kids
(32:46):
to commute to space for work in the next ten years.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Just to press you, there is also a darker potentiality, right,
And going back to our friend read Albergotti, he wrote
in his that news letter the nineteen sixty seven how
to Space Treaty make space subject international law, but in
more recent US law allows companies to keep what they mind.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Out there artmiss records, yep, and.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Will eventually it will mean a borderless internet and an
industrial supply chain that is beyond the reach or control
of any country. Science fiction has plenty of warnings for
what these companies might look like.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yes, that's true.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
One of the things we're we've thought about in the
context of policy for the Moon, for example, is how
do we avoid a mill town and the exploitativeness of
a mill town. So if you remember milltown's where the
company store basically owns all of the employees and they're exploitative,
it's hard for them to leave. You can imagine some
company operating on the Moon decides that they own your
(33:42):
air because they transported you there as an employee, and
you can't just walk outside and go home.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
You'd have to be dependent on them to get back
to Earth.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
There's all these different potentials that you know, the Summer
four article and comment hits on, and I think one
of the jobs of creators of this technology like us,
is to say, let's work on some combination of technological
solutions that mitigate some of the risks like space debris
or green propulsion for the carbon footprint. Let's also work
(34:10):
on policy frameworks and regulatory frameworks that seed in some
of the values that we care about in an open
and free society. We don't have to give up and say,
oh man, it's just going to be a gold rush
and we're going to let the Moon be chopped up
and be treated in a way that seeds these dystopian futures.
It really is a moment to say, this is our responsibility,
(34:32):
this is the time. Let's do some regulatory and policy
work to try to put a better future in place.
And I think that that is something we certainly work
on at Aurralia Institute. There are amazing groups like Open
Lunar Foundation that are also looking at this. We're certainly
not alone in it, but it is I think worthy
of you pressing me on because now is the time
(34:53):
to figure that out in a principled fashion and not
wait to see how it plays out and then try to.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Fix it later. Area con think of a better place
to and thank you.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Thank you so much. It is a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
That's it for tech Stuff this week. I'm Osvo Looshian.
This episode was produced by Elisa Dennis and Melissa Slaughter.
It was executive produced by me Karen Price, Julian Nutter,
and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina norvelve iHeart Podcasts.
The engineer is Kathleen Conti and Jack Insley makes this episode.
Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Please do rate, review,
(35:35):
and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at
gmail dot com.
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