June 26, 2026 • 37 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.
Download SAILY in your app store and use our code techstuff at checkout to get an exclusive 15% off your first purchase! For further details go tohttps://saily.com/techstuff
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, it's us here. I'm traveling this week and next
week is the fourth of July, so we won't be
publishing a Week in Tech episode for the next two Fridays,
but we'll hear from all of our favorite tech contributors
once again starting July tenth. In the meantime, I wanted
to share an episode from earlier this year that really
expanded my understanding of space and the new frontier that's emerging.
(00:21):
Hope you enjoy Welcome to Tech stuff. I'm as Voloshen,
and this is the story today. I want to start
with a clip from a recent interview with Elon Musk.
(00:43):
Five years from now, my prediction is we will launch
and be operating every year more AI in space. There
must 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, it seems insane, but I recently
met someone who painted a compelling vision of humans as
(01:06):
a spacefaring race, Aerial Explore. She founded MIT's Space Exploration Land.
She's an inventor and a space venture capital investor. Her
signature project is self assembling structures in space, essentially magnetic
prefabs that drag themselves into the correct configuration by magnetic
(01:27):
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 it turns out Aeriel is already working on. I
(01:51):
wanted to know where the 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 (02:04):
The first way I think we should cover for data
centers is space is not cold in the way that
people think in the context of Oh, therefore it must
be easy to cool data center electronics in space. Unfortunately,
it's not that easy in space. You don't have convective cooling.
So if you think about how data centers are cooled
on Earth, you literally you flow water through something that's
(02:26):
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 (02:34):
Distribute the heat.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
It basically soaks up with the heat.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
The heat 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.
So it's not that it's better to put data centers
in space because space is going to keep them cold.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
That's not the case.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
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,
(03:20):
so a much more efficient way to get closer to
that energy. Is it the simplest place to put a
data center? No, is it necessarily the most engineering efficient way.
You know, we could have a little argument about whether
it is or isn't.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
I think Elon is really arguing that it is.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
There are certain aspects like radiative heat transfer that make
it difficult but not insurmountable.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
So that's kind of where we are.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
That's my overview take on AI data centers, and we
are excited for Rendezv ro 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 orbit.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
So you've actually been working on this problem of data
centers in space before it became yes.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yes, because the challenge is you can't fold up something
as big as a football field and put it into
a rocket. That's how we do things now in space, right,
James Webb 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. Right,
(04:22):
and then we try to get it to space. We
need modular tiles more like legos, think space legos. If
you have kids listening to this podcast, magnetiles, right, it's
a very popular toy these days. 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
(04:43):
modules in space.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
I love magnets.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
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 (04:57):
What was the moment that's happened in the last three
or four months where this way from something that you
were working on but most people hadn't heard of, to
something that everyone has an opinion about.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
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 (05:26):
And on the space technology side, the main breakthrough has
been driving down cost of getting stuff into space exactly right.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
So that's a huge that's a great point in that
why are we considering space at all for this AI
data center plays 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 a kilogram, which is remarkable.
(05:56):
That's like FedEx. 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.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Feasibly shipped to space with a reasonable cost.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
And this happened because of Elon.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
In many ways.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
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 seven or an airbus to Europe and
then you take away right and so Elon realized this
(06:37):
really 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 (06:49):
You wear a lot of hats. You found it that
the MIT Space Exploration Initiative you run a nonprofit and
correct me if I like any of these wrong books.
A nonprofit space architecture lab called Arali 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
(07:11):
company star Cloud on the data centersance space. Is that
comprehensive or the other habs as well?
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Yes, that is comprehensive.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
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
(07:38):
stuff that we spin 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 (07:53):
And how do you spend your time? I mean, you've
got fundraising, You've got capital deployment, you've got pr cause too. Yes.
Do you still do science as well? And I do, yeah, potitecture.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
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 Tessa Ray,
which is my mitphd thesis, is you can design a
modular tile. In our case, they're shaped like hexagons and pentagons,
(08:25):
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
(08:45):
this year.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
It's still my passion is.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
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 (08:57):
We'll put a link in the show notes, but there's
an amazing video. These tiles, which are basically hexagonal tiles,
go to the International Space Station.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Right.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Yeah, they've gone twice and.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
They sort of throw in the air and like a
magic tree or not throw in the air, but they're
released yes, and like a magic tree, they find each
other and kick together.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
They do.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
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
(09:39):
fit perfectly, and it's almost like a little ballet. It's
like someone's orchestrating them to come together, but it's autonomous,
so they have some propulsional it's just 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 (09:54):
Was this all your idea? And how do you come
up with this?
Speaker 2 (09:56):
I was inspired by a presentation that Mary AxMan gave
when I was at MIT. Sonarry Oxman is just this
absolutely stunning, inspiring architect and designer, and she gave a
class called Design Across Scales and invited scalar tippets from
MIT to come Skalar Tippets runs the self assembly lab
(10:16):
at MIT, and they were talking about self assembly on Earth,
and I knew. I was sitting in this audience, thinking
we should be doing this in space. It's so much
harder to do it on the ground, which is what
Skylar'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.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Took at MIT.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
At Fast forward ten years and you're now working on
a commercial application of that for a company back by Nvidio,
which is the largest company on the US soup market.
I think, did you imagine that?
Speaker 3 (10:47):
No? Yeah, it's been incredible.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
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 (11:01):
Do you think that will be the commercial application that
makes this all real for you?
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Yes, 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.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
That's goal is exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
It's like, I really want the long term commercial success
to be we are self assembling these massive space habitats
and putting.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
People in them, and what will they do when they
get there?
Speaker 3 (11:36):
In the next five years.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
This is aggressive timeline to hold myself to, but I
think in the next five years, maybe seven max, we
will try to put in orbit a space.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Orbital bio lab.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
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 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,
(12:09):
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 near perfect matrix of those protein
layers that make the artificial retina. So we actually are
leading the investment round in a company called Lamb Division
that is making artificial retinas in space. Bringing them back
(12:32):
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 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
(12:53):
one of the reasons we want in orbital buy all that.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
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 to actually
be commercialized.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Yes, 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 to 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.
(13:29):
And the example that I usually give people is if
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
(13:52):
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 ot orbital transit vehicles.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Someone is going to make a shit ton of money.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
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
knowledge from being so intimately integrated into the space industry
that helps advise our strategy as VC investors.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
When did this love affair with space looking for you?
Speaker 2 (14:24):
When I was a kid, I was growing up with
two Air Force pilot parents. So my dad was an
ATEN 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 served
(14:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
So the joke is, how do you surpass double pilot? Parents?
You got to go to space. That's the only thing left.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
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 3 (15:09):
Yes, there are two related.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
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 of feasibility because it's not really an
open science question anymore. It's a question of engineering, willpower,
(15:35):
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
I 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 bio inspired robots
(15:59):
that have various critical functionalities for the space mission. So
we built a swarm robot that we call astra Ant,
an adorbal little car the size of my thumb, and
we sent it to the Moon last spring on my
team to do that. So it has sensors all over
the car so it can pick up temperature, can do
a camera payload, and do imaging on the Moon for
(16:21):
future iterations. The first one that we sent was very simple,
but we're super excited now that we've developed the astra
Ant 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 (16:34):
Read out Brigotti, who writes the seventh 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 without understanding robots.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Yes, that's so true.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Because I focus my life's work around space architecture. I
really do deeply believe why humans need to go, but
that's not to say that they're not, you know, profoundly
supported by robots.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Why is it important for humans to go to space?
Speaker 3 (17:10):
So I have kind of a three part answer to this.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
The first is just tactical, which is, we learn so
much by going into space as humans that helps us
do spin off technologies for life on Earth. So there's
a huge history of NASA, you know, Kevlar microwaves, some
people say even lays a guy's surgery in some part
from the Shuttle program.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
So that's very tactical. The second is more strategic.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
So the first is a playback you learned something along
the way.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
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 a the more that we learn about especially the
near neighborhood of our solar system, the more we understand
(17:58):
about 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
(18:18):
that we see on the Earth, and that image, called
earth Rise, launched 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
(18:39):
to to robots. I don't think we'd be very satisfied
as a species just doing teleoperation and VR headset viewing
of some robots life on Mars. Right, we are a
species that loves knowledge. For the sake of knowledge, we
need to go.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
That was in ninety sixty eight you mentioned, Yes, is
it called the overview effect?
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Is that 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
(19:17):
onto this really delicate, beautiful blue marble of a planet
and saying, you know, holy cow, this is really something
worthy of protecting.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
And I think we.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
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 exporation 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
(19:46):
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 (19:59):
The third well, that was a third one.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
That's the third pie. Yeah, his orbital biolabs.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
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, and 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 convince my LPs
(20:24):
will give returns for an ROI focused venture fund in
the next seven years. But also what do 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 (20:39):
What do you aimed at?
Speaker 2 (20:40):
What's the big picture why of why you're putting all
this money into stuff? And for me, that is where
the you know, dreamier large scale vision comes to. Which
is the benefit of humanity, expanding humanity's horizons and making
us a space faring species.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
After the break, the environmental costs of commercial space and
how a space pac man might help stay with us.
When you're traveling abroad, Wi Fi is always an issue.
Maybe you can't find it, or maybe you can, but
(21:18):
the Wi Fi network that's available looks a little bit
sketchy and makes you think it might not be safe
to connect to. I've certainly had that feeling, and it's
why having a local SIM card on your phone can
make all the difference. But you don't have to literally
buy one. That's where sale comes in. An e SIM
service that is as simple as downloading an app, and
that gives you instant Internet access wherever you're traveling. That
(21:41):
is safe and secure internet with built in cybersecurity features
like web protection and ad blockers, and no need for
local Wi Fi. All you have to do is download
the Sale app on your mobile device and choose the
plan that works best for you. Once you install the
e sim Sale will be instantly activated, so you can
start your trip off right. Download Saley in your app
store and use our code tech Stuff at checkout to
(22:04):
get an exclusive fifteen percent off your first purchase. See
details in the podcast episode description box. How do you
think about the cost? I mean, Elon has talked about
ten thousand launches a year, which I 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?
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Debrisah, debris. How do you think about the environmental cost
of these dreams?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
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
(22:52):
of this paradigm of chemical rocket propulsion as the only
way to get master to orbit. And I do think
that that's really important. Is we need to do that
search 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
(23:15):
we have that responsibility to take it seriously and innovate
it around it now.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
And does a debris pose a medium time risk?
Speaker 2 (23:21):
I mean yes, so you're talking about the debris in orbit? Yeah,
space problem, It certainly is. 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
(23:43):
not as crowded or as fuzzy as it looks on
these images that people see online that are depicting the
space debris.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
But it is serious.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
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 (24:00):
But yeah, it's serious.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
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, so ISSA is really motivated.
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 around and metaphorically eats, but really just collects
(24:26):
a big ball of debris until there's enough mass in
that aggregate that it starts to be 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.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Little pac Man.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
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 to remediate I.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
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 (25:07):
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. Yeah, through mid 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,
(25:31):
but you know, from different nationalities, from private spaceflight participants
who are not government agency trained astronauts, which as individuals
who went and she asked them questions 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
(25:51):
living in space? What was the most disgusting experience that
you had, what was the most profound, beautiful heart you know,
expand experience that you had. And in particular, 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
(26:18):
you know, points servisors or a one percent of human talent.
If we're going to start welcoming more people into the
space industry, into our Aurelia Tessaray 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
Sana's favorite quotes from her program is that an astronaut said,
(26:38):
life in space on the International Space Station is like
sleeping under your desk in the lab. You know, like
that's and it's amazing. Many people would 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
(27:00):
wouldn't put you in a position where you're going to
be there for six months or a year. And Sana's work,
I think has really profoundly 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 (27:16):
It's really 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
(27:37):
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
on a slee 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 (27:56):
And comfortable and empowering.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
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 (28:04):
That unlocks the ability.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
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 mockup of our
Tessa Ray space habitat. We've exhibited it around a ted
at 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
(28:28):
bubbling in space? 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,
(28:48):
like oxygen, and that would supplement the life support system.
So it's both pragmatic and functional, but also hopefully beautiful
and stunning.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
So take me from where we are today to people
being inside these environments in space, or maybe take you
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
(29:18):
successfully is one thing. I guess, the maintenance is another ye.
And the challenge of getting people to and from that's
already been solved. Essentially, it's the same docking technology if
used on.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
The as precise 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 going to
you know, leverage the SpaceX delivery or other companies that
will be able to come and dock. And I do
think for that five year timeframe that I gave you
(29:49):
five to seven years for an orbital biolab, 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
(30:09):
up since the I think it was like maybe completed
the design in nineteen ninety eight, flew in early two
thousand so over twenty years, it's old.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
It's like any home. It really desperately needs a reno.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
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
assemble and then attach our tests array self assembling module
(30:42):
if it's an orbal 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 (30:53):
Do you have absolute confidence that you will go to
space in one of your tessaray assembled domes.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
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 (31:22):
Yes, just before we close, and I know this idea
of democratizing space is something which is motivating for you.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
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
(31:52):
work with, either directly or indirectly, whose platform technology is
enabled what you're doing, but his goals may not be
the same as yours.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Such just sing 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
(32:21):
a 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 and
goal around the world. That is the progression that Elon
and really to give credit to gwenn Shot well as
well at SpaceX and Blue Origin and Bezos and many
(32:42):
other companies.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
That's what they're trying to achieve.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
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
(33:07):
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
(33:28):
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
(33:48):
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 to
(34:08):
commute to space for work in the next ten years.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Just to press you, there is also a darker potentiality, right,
And going back to our friend read Albergotti, he wrote
in that news letter, the nineteen sixty seven Out of
Space Treaty makes space subject international law, but a more
recent US law allows companies to keep what they mind.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
Out there ar domiss records.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Yep, it 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 (34:41):
Yes, that's true.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
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 mill town's where
the company store basically owns all of their employees and
they're exploitative, it's hard for them to leave. Can imagine
some company operating on the Moon decides that they own
(35:04):
your air because they transported you there as an employee,
and you can't just walk outside and go home. You'd
have to be dependent on them to get back to Earth.
There's all these different potentials that 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
(35:28):
some of the risks like space debris or green propulsion
for the carbon footprint. Let's also work 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
(35:48):
treated in a way that seeds these dystopian futures. It
really is a moment to say, this is our responsibility,
this is the time let's do some you know, 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 Aurelia Institute. There are amazing groups
like Open Lunar Foundation that are also looking at this.
(36:09):
We're certainly not alone in it, but it is I
think worthy of you pressing me on because now is
the time to figure that out in a principled fashion
and not wait to see how it plays out and
then try to fix it later.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Ery, I can't think of a better place to and
thank you.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Thank you so much. It is a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
That's if it techs Stuff this week, I'm OsO Loosian.
This episode was produced by Elisa Dennis and Melissa Slaughter.
It was executive produced by me Karen Price, Julian Nutta,
and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina novelve iHeart Podcasts.
The engineer is Kathleen Conti and Jack Insley makes this episode.
Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Please do rate, review
(36:58):
and reach out to us at tech Stuff Pod Cars
at gmail dot com. Mm hmm
Hey, it's us here. I'm traveling this week and next
week is the fourth of July, so we won't be
publishing a Week in Tech episode for the next two Fridays,
but we'll hear from all of our favorite tech contributors
once again starting July tenth. In the meantime, I wanted
to share an episode from earlier this year that really
expanded my understanding of space and the new frontier that's emerging.
(00:21):
Hope you enjoy Welcome to Tech stuff. I'm as Voloshen,
and this is the story today. I want to start
with a clip from a recent interview with Elon Musk.
(00:43):
Five years from now, my prediction is we will launch
and be operating every year more AI in space. There
must 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, it seems insane, but I recently
met someone who painted a compelling vision of humans as
(01:06):
a spacefaring race, Aerial Explore. She founded MIT's Space Exploration Land.
She's an inventor and a space venture capital investor. Her
signature project is self assembling structures in space, essentially magnetic
prefabs that drag themselves into the correct configuration by magnetic
(01:27):
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 it turns out Aeriel is already working on. I
(01:51):
wanted to know where the 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 (02:04):
The first way I think we should cover for data
centers is space is not cold in the way that
people think in the context of Oh, therefore it must
be easy to cool data center electronics in space. Unfortunately,
it's not that easy in space. You don't have convective cooling.
So if you think about how data centers are cooled
on Earth, you literally you flow water through something that's
(02:26):
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 (02:34):
Distribute the heat.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
It basically soaks up with the heat.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
The heat 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.
So it's not that it's better to put data centers
in space because space is going to keep them cold.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
That's not the case.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
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,
(03:20):
so a much more efficient way to get closer to
that energy. Is it the simplest place to put a
data center? No, is it necessarily the most engineering efficient way.
You know, we could have a little argument about whether
it is or isn't.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
I think Elon is really arguing that it is.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
There are certain aspects like radiative heat transfer that make
it difficult but not insurmountable.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
So that's kind of where we are.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
That's my overview take on AI data centers, and we
are excited for Rendezv ro 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 orbit.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
So you've actually been working on this problem of data
centers in space before it became yes.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yes, because the challenge is you can't fold up something
as big as a football field and put it into
a rocket. That's how we do things now in space, right,
James Webb 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. Right,
(04:22):
and then we try to get it to space. We
need modular tiles more like legos, think space legos. If
you have kids listening to this podcast, magnetiles, right, it's
a very popular toy these days. 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
(04:43):
modules in space.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
I love magnets.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
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 (04:57):
What was the moment that's happened in the last three
or four months where this way from something that you
were working on but most people hadn't heard of, to
something that everyone has an opinion about.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
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 (05:26):
And on the space technology side, the main breakthrough has
been driving down cost of getting stuff into space exactly right.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
So that's a huge that's a great point in that
why are we considering space at all for this AI
data center plays 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 a kilogram, which is remarkable.
(05:56):
That's like FedEx. 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.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Feasibly shipped to space with a reasonable cost.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
And this happened because of Elon.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
In many ways.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
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 seven or an airbus to Europe and
then you take away right and so Elon realized this
(06:37):
really 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 (06:49):
You wear a lot of hats. You found it that
the MIT Space Exploration Initiative you run a nonprofit and
correct me if I like any of these wrong books.
A nonprofit space architecture lab called Arali 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
(07:11):
company star Cloud on the data centersance space. Is that
comprehensive or the other habs as well?
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Yes, that is comprehensive.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
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
(07:38):
stuff that we spin 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 (07:53):
And how do you spend your time? I mean, you've
got fundraising, You've got capital deployment, you've got pr cause too. Yes.
Do you still do science as well? And I do, yeah, potitecture.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
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 Tessa Ray,
which is my mitphd thesis, is you can design a
modular tile. In our case, they're shaped like hexagons and pentagons,
(08:25):
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
(08:45):
this year.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
It's still my passion is.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
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 (08:57):
We'll put a link in the show notes, but there's
an amazing video. These tiles, which are basically hexagonal tiles,
go to the International Space Station.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Right.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Yeah, they've gone twice and.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
They sort of throw in the air and like a
magic tree or not throw in the air, but they're
released yes, and like a magic tree, they find each
other and kick together.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
They do.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
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
(09:39):
fit perfectly, and it's almost like a little ballet. It's
like someone's orchestrating them to come together, but it's autonomous,
so they have some propulsional it's just 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 (09:54):
Was this all your idea? And how do you come
up with this?
Speaker 2 (09:56):
I was inspired by a presentation that Mary AxMan gave
when I was at MIT. Sonarry Oxman is just this
absolutely stunning, inspiring architect and designer, and she gave a
class called Design Across Scales and invited scalar tippets from
MIT to come Skalar Tippets runs the self assembly lab
(10:16):
at MIT, and they were talking about self assembly on Earth,
and I knew. I was sitting in this audience, thinking
we should be doing this in space. It's so much
harder to do it on the ground, which is what
Skylar'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.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Took at MIT.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
At Fast forward ten years and you're now working on
a commercial application of that for a company back by Nvidio,
which is the largest company on the US soup market.
I think, did you imagine that?
Speaker 3 (10:47):
No? Yeah, it's been incredible.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
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 (11:01):
Do you think that will be the commercial application that
makes this all real for you?
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Yes, 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.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
That's goal is exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
It's like, I really want the long term commercial success
to be we are self assembling these massive space habitats
and putting.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
People in them, and what will they do when they
get there?
Speaker 3 (11:36):
In the next five years.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
This is aggressive timeline to hold myself to, but I
think in the next five years, maybe seven max, we
will try to put in orbit a space.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Orbital bio lab.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
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 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,
(12:09):
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 near perfect matrix of those protein
layers that make the artificial retina. So we actually are
leading the investment round in a company called Lamb Division
that is making artificial retinas in space. Bringing them back
(12:32):
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 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
(12:53):
one of the reasons we want in orbital buy all that.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
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 to actually
be commercialized.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Yes, 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 to 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.
(13:29):
And the example that I usually give people is if
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
(13:52):
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 ot orbital transit vehicles.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Someone is going to make a shit ton of money.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
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
knowledge from being so intimately integrated into the space industry
that helps advise our strategy as VC investors.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
When did this love affair with space looking for you?
Speaker 2 (14:24):
When I was a kid, I was growing up with
two Air Force pilot parents. So my dad was an
ATEN 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 served
(14:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
So the joke is, how do you surpass double pilot? Parents?
You got to go to space. That's the only thing left.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
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 3 (15:09):
Yes, there are two related.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
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 of feasibility because it's not really an
open science question anymore. It's a question of engineering, willpower,
(15:35):
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
I 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 bio inspired robots
(15:59):
that have various critical functionalities for the space mission. So
we built a swarm robot that we call astra Ant,
an adorbal little car the size of my thumb, and
we sent it to the Moon last spring on my
team to do that. So it has sensors all over
the car so it can pick up temperature, can do
a camera payload, and do imaging on the Moon for
(16:21):
future iterations. The first one that we sent was very simple,
but we're super excited now that we've developed the astra
Ant 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 (16:34):
Read out Brigotti, who writes the seventh 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 without understanding robots.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Yes, that's so true.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Because I focus my life's work around space architecture. I
really do deeply believe why humans need to go, but
that's not to say that they're not, you know, profoundly
supported by robots.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Why is it important for humans to go to space?
Speaker 3 (17:10):
So I have kind of a three part answer to this.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
The first is just tactical, which is, we learn so
much by going into space as humans that helps us
do spin off technologies for life on Earth. So there's
a huge history of NASA, you know, Kevlar microwaves, some
people say even lays a guy's surgery in some part
from the Shuttle program.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
So that's very tactical. The second is more strategic.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
So the first is a playback you learned something along
the way.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
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 a the more that we learn about especially the
near neighborhood of our solar system, the more we understand
(17:58):
about 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
(18:18):
that we see on the Earth, and that image, called
earth Rise, launched 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
(18:39):
to to robots. I don't think we'd be very satisfied
as a species just doing teleoperation and VR headset viewing
of some robots life on Mars. Right, we are a
species that loves knowledge. For the sake of knowledge, we
need to go.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
That was in ninety sixty eight you mentioned, Yes, is
it called the overview effect?
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Is that 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
(19:17):
onto this really delicate, beautiful blue marble of a planet
and saying, you know, holy cow, this is really something
worthy of protecting.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
And I think we.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
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 exporation 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
(19:46):
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 (19:59):
The third well, that was a third one.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
That's the third pie. Yeah, his orbital biolabs.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
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, and 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 convince my LPs
(20:24):
will give returns for an ROI focused venture fund in
the next seven years. But also what do 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 (20:39):
What do you aimed at?
Speaker 2 (20:40):
What's the big picture why of why you're putting all
this money into stuff? And for me, that is where
the you know, dreamier large scale vision comes to. Which
is the benefit of humanity, expanding humanity's horizons and making
us a space faring species.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
After the break, the environmental costs of commercial space and
how a space pac man might help stay with us.
When you're traveling abroad, Wi Fi is always an issue.
Maybe you can't find it, or maybe you can, but
(21:18):
the Wi Fi network that's available looks a little bit
sketchy and makes you think it might not be safe
to connect to. I've certainly had that feeling, and it's
why having a local SIM card on your phone can
make all the difference. But you don't have to literally
buy one. That's where sale comes in. An e SIM
service that is as simple as downloading an app, and
that gives you instant Internet access wherever you're traveling. That
(21:41):
is safe and secure internet with built in cybersecurity features
like web protection and ad blockers, and no need for
local Wi Fi. All you have to do is download
the Sale app on your mobile device and choose the
plan that works best for you. Once you install the
e sim Sale will be instantly activated, so you can
start your trip off right. Download Saley in your app
store and use our code tech Stuff at checkout to
(22:04):
get an exclusive fifteen percent off your first purchase. See
details in the podcast episode description box. How do you
think about the cost? I mean, Elon has talked about
ten thousand launches a year, which I 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?
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Debrisah, debris. How do you think about the environmental cost
of these dreams?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
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
(22:52):
of this paradigm of chemical rocket propulsion as the only
way to get master to orbit. And I do think
that that's really important. Is we need to do that
search 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
(23:15):
we have that responsibility to take it seriously and innovate
it around it now.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
And does a debris pose a medium time risk?
Speaker 2 (23:21):
I mean yes, so you're talking about the debris in orbit? Yeah,
space problem, It certainly is. 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
(23:43):
not as crowded or as fuzzy as it looks on
these images that people see online that are depicting the
space debris.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
But it is serious.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
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 (24:00):
But yeah, it's serious.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
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, so ISSA is really motivated.
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 around and metaphorically eats, but really just collects
(24:26):
a big ball of debris until there's enough mass in
that aggregate that it starts to be 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.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Little pac Man.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
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 to remediate I.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
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 (25:07):
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. Yeah, through mid 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,
(25:31):
but you know, from different nationalities, from private spaceflight participants
who are not government agency trained astronauts, which as individuals
who went and she asked them questions 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
(25:51):
living in space? What was the most disgusting experience that
you had, what was the most profound, beautiful heart you know,
expand experience that you had. And in particular, 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
(26:18):
you know, points servisors or a one percent of human talent.
If we're going to start welcoming more people into the
space industry, into our Aurelia Tessaray 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
Sana's favorite quotes from her program is that an astronaut said,
(26:38):
life in space on the International Space Station is like
sleeping under your desk in the lab. You know, like
that's and it's amazing. Many people would 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
(27:00):
wouldn't put you in a position where you're going to
be there for six months or a year. And Sana's work,
I think has really profoundly 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 (27:16):
It's really 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
(27:37):
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
on a slee 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 (27:56):
And comfortable and empowering.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
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 (28:04):
That unlocks the ability.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
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 mockup of our
Tessa Ray space habitat. We've exhibited it around a ted
at 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
(28:28):
bubbling in space? 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,
(28:48):
like oxygen, and that would supplement the life support system.
So it's both pragmatic and functional, but also hopefully beautiful
and stunning.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
So take me from where we are today to people
being inside these environments in space, or maybe take you
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
(29:18):
successfully is one thing. I guess, the maintenance is another ye.
And the challenge of getting people to and from that's
already been solved. Essentially, it's the same docking technology if
used on.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
The as precise 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 going to
you know, leverage the SpaceX delivery or other companies that
will be able to come and dock. And I do
think for that five year timeframe that I gave you
(29:49):
five to seven years for an orbital biolab, 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
(30:09):
up since the I think it was like maybe completed
the design in nineteen ninety eight, flew in early two
thousand so over twenty years, it's old.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
It's like any home. It really desperately needs a reno.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
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
assemble and then attach our tests array self assembling module
(30:42):
if it's an orbal 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 (30:53):
Do you have absolute confidence that you will go to
space in one of your tessaray assembled domes.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
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 (31:22):
Yes, just before we close, and I know this idea
of democratizing space is something which is motivating for you.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
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
(31:52):
work with, either directly or indirectly, whose platform technology is
enabled what you're doing, but his goals may not be
the same as yours.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Such just sing 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
(32:21):
a 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 and
goal around the world. That is the progression that Elon
and really to give credit to gwenn Shot well as
well at SpaceX and Blue Origin and Bezos and many
(32:42):
other companies.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
That's what they're trying to achieve.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
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
(33:07):
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
(33:28):
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
(33:48):
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 to
(34:08):
commute to space for work in the next ten years.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Just to press you, there is also a darker potentiality, right,
And going back to our friend read Albergotti, he wrote
in that news letter, the nineteen sixty seven Out of
Space Treaty makes space subject international law, but a more
recent US law allows companies to keep what they mind.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
Out there ar domiss records.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Yep, it 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 (34:41):
Yes, that's true.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
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 mill town's where
the company store basically owns all of their employees and
they're exploitative, it's hard for them to leave. Can imagine
some company operating on the Moon decides that they own
(35:04):
your air because they transported you there as an employee,
and you can't just walk outside and go home. You'd
have to be dependent on them to get back to Earth.
There's all these different potentials that 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
(35:28):
some of the risks like space debris or green propulsion
for the carbon footprint. Let's also work 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
(35:48):
treated in a way that seeds these dystopian futures. It
really is a moment to say, this is our responsibility,
this is the time let's do some you know, 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 Aurelia Institute. There are amazing groups
like Open Lunar Foundation that are also looking at this.
(36:09):
We're certainly not alone in it, but it is I
think worthy of you pressing me on because now is
the time to figure that out in a principled fashion
and not wait to see how it plays out and
then try to fix it later.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Ery, I can't think of a better place to and
thank you.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Thank you so much. It is a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
That's if it techs Stuff this week, I'm OsO Loosian.
This episode was produced by Elisa Dennis and Melissa Slaughter.
It was executive produced by me Karen Price, Julian Nutta,
and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina novelve iHeart Podcasts.
The engineer is Kathleen Conti and Jack Insley makes this episode.
Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Please do rate, review
(36:58):
and reach out to us at tech Stuff Pod Cars
at gmail dot com. Mm hmm
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
Hey Jonas!
Hey Jonas! The official Jonas Brothers podcast. Hosted by Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas. It’s the Jonas Brothers you know... musicians, actors, and well, yes, brothers. Now, they’re sharing another side of themselves in the playful, intimate, and irreverent way only they can. Spend time with the Jonas Brothers here and stay a little bit longer for deep conversations like never before.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.
Betrayal Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.