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March 26, 2024 38 mins
In this episode of The Bom: Engineering a Path Forward, I’m going to ask you to think about a rather futurist question: what does daily life look like in space? Sure, we have the Hollywood version of life amongst the stars. Star Wars, Dune, and even cult classics like Alien give us an idealistic glimpse. However, these are far from the reality of what it’s like to gather around and break bread in zero gravity.

Today’s guest is Sana Sharma, the co-founder and chief design officer at the Aurelia Institute, a non-profit space architecture R&D lab. Throughout this episode, she gives us an inside look into the incredible research she and her team have conducted into the ways that astronauts live their daily lives while on missions in the final frontier, how advanced technology doesn’t have to exclude the human factor, and how she hopes her research will change the future of space exploration. 

The views and opinions expressed within this content are solely the speaker's and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of Supplyframe or its affiliates.
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(00:00):
One of the things that we reallylearned was the importance of the dining table
as a communal locus in terms ofbringing people together, checking in making sure
everyone's doing well, as well assort of the value in ritual of breaking
bread in space and how important aritual that was in terms of tying you
back to home as well as connectingyou to each other. In this episode

(00:22):
of The Bomb Engineering a Path Forward, I'm going to ask you to think
about a rather futurist question, whatdoes daily life look like in space?
Sure, we have the Hollywood versionof life amongst the stars, Star Wars,
Dune, and even cult classics likeAlien give us a glimpse into the
possibilities. However, these are farfrom the reality of what it's like to
gather around and break bread in zerogravity. The guest of this episode aims

(00:45):
to answer this question. Sana Sharmais the co founder and Chief design Officer
at the Auralia Institute, a nonprofitspace architecture R and D lab, and
she's committed to two fundamental ideas forthe future. One is that people will
be spending more and more time inspace, and the second idea is that
the public should have access to researchregarding space travel. Today, Sauna is
going to give us an inside lookinto the incredible research she and our team

(01:07):
have conducted into the ways that astronautslive their daily lives while on missions in
the Final Frontier, how advanced technologydoesn't have to exclude the human factor,
and how she hopes her research willchange the future of space exploration with open
source information at the forefront. Thisis my conversation with Sana Sharma and this
is the Bomb. We live ina time where design and technology touch every

(01:36):
aspect of our lives. But wheredid it all come from? Who designed
it? How is it built andbrought to market? What will look like
in a year, two years,one hundred years. From the phones and
smartwatches that help us in our dayto day to the cutting edge spaceships and
three D printers that are leading usinto the future. Modern design is constantly
shaping the way we work, communicate, problem solve and play, and every

(01:57):
new design, bigger, small,starts with an idea and all of materials.
I'm agenta strongheart and this is theBomb where we talk to leading innovators
in the tech world and celebrate thetransformational power of design. Thanks so much,
Sona for joining us on the Bombtoday. Really excited to learn more

(02:19):
about your work you're doing in architectureand design for space, which honestly I
have very little understanding around. SoI'm very genuinely curious to learn from you
and your background and what your latestprojects are today. Thank you so much
for having me. I'm delighted tobe here. Awesome. So I think
it'd be interesting just to start alittle bit with your background and how you

(02:40):
got into this work. In alittle bit of my research before, I
learned that you study architecture and designat Yale and Harvard and then started working
at IBM and then got into MITMedia Lab. So I'd love to hear
a little bit more about the journeyand how you first got interested, even
if it was before kind of formaleducation and interested in design and architecture.

(03:01):
Yeah, it's been a bit ofa curcutest path to where I own today,
but it's been a fun one forsure. I initially, when starting
off school, wanted to be aphysicist, and I love physics and astronomy.
I have for a very very longtime. Actually met my co founder
and CEO Ariel k Blot in firstyear of physics in undergrad she stuck it

(03:23):
out with a physics degree, butI ended up getting persuaded and pulled over
to architecture and design, and fromthere I've spent most of my career working
as an emerging technologies designer. Morebroadly, but I mean by that is
that I'm a designer who knows justenough science to be dangerous or enjoy sort
of science and technical problems and workingwith engineers and researchers to help sort of

(03:43):
find the human element and what theydo and share that with a broad audience.
And so went to school for that, spent a good number of years
at IBM Research working on their quantumcompeting and generative AI teams, again trying
to find those human stories as wellas try to make some of those technologies
more accessible for an audience folks whomaybe don't have PhDs and something like quantum
information science. And then went backto a graduate school where I got pulled

(04:08):
into the MIT Space Exploration Initiative,where Ariel was director. We collaborated on
some research while I was working there, have the great privilege of working with
and interviewing astronauts and cosmonauts and spaceflightparticipants to learn a little bit more about
what the day to day life ofspace is like outside sort of the parameters
of the mission. And after acouple of years of working with Ariel at

(04:30):
Mitsci the initiative, she had thisidea of spinning out the nonprofit Aurelia Institute
focused on space architecture R and Dwith the sort of education and policy background
as sort of forming a three pillarapproach. And we had a chat where
it sounded like a really fantastic opportunityto sort of push what we can do
from both sort of a technical aswell as a human centered perspective on space

(04:54):
and architectural design. That's an incrediblekind of convergence of a lot of different
disciplines. And I feel like projectsand research that you were doing, and
I feel like I could dive intoany one of those kind of lanes deeper.
I'm already thinking of a million differentquestions. But before we get further
into kind of the current project,I'm curious if do you have any examples

(05:15):
of like the most interesting things youlearned during this was it the astronaut Ethnography
project? Yeah, when you weredoing the research around day to day life
in space? What were some ofthe most surprising things. The Astronaut Thenography
Project was a really fantastic opportunity forus both at MITSI the initiative based out

(05:35):
of the Media Lab, as wellas informing some of the work we've done
at a really institute itself. Westarted off with this sort of basic question
when it comes to learning from astronauts. We know a lot about astronaut health,
we understand sort of what mission parametersare like, but we were really
interested in whether or not they weresort of deeper experiential or maybe even cultural

(05:57):
insights to be gained from ASTRA ornot, and whether or not they could
be beneficial in envisioning and realizing whatsort of the future of life and space
could look like. Can we learnfrom the culture of the ISS right now
in order to envision a future ofwhat life and space might look like moving
forward. We had the tremendous privilegeof interviewing folks who'd actually been to space

(06:17):
and talking to them less about sortof the accomplishments of the mission, but
more about what that daily life waslike outside of it, from a sensory
experience, from an individual experience,and from an interactive and a cultural experience
as well. You have sort ofdiverse crews of people coming together and working
on things in an environment that isfamiliar but also pretty pretty extreme and sometimes

(06:40):
dangerous, and sort of that workingrelationship, that crew relationship becomes really important.
And so we're very interested in whatmicrogravity does to sort of day to
day operations, sort of what it'slike to learn to live in a just
and zero G, but also sortof what space culture might look like moving
forward in terms of what we mightbe able to learn from people who've been
to space US, and our goalhas been to open source as much of

(07:01):
that knowledge as we can in termsof the primary sources themselves, as well
as some of the research we've donein terms of opportunity areas for designing novel
things for space based on these humancentered ideas, as well as a series
of design principles as a way ofsharing what we've learned in a more actionable
or practical way. That's so interesting, So would you say it's kind of

(07:25):
the idea is to build a libraryof resources, essentially for future designers or
people that are designing for the futurein space and kind of thinking about what
that's going to look like over thenext how would you say that timeline kind
of is like in the near future, over the next ten years, twenty

(07:45):
years. Is there even a limit? I mean, or it's kind of
just since it is in a waystill the wild West, thinking about all
that's possible there. There's so muchtoo, and it's a great question that
we've actually evolved upon ourselves. Whenwe first developed this project at SI.
Our goal we started small. Ourgoal was to help this cohort of students

(08:05):
and faculty members and staff members whowere all thinking about, well, what
would it be like to design forzero G or what would it be like
to design for space, helping getthem sort of anecdotal or experiential information about
what that was like outside of thepretty sort of extremely informative but fairly sort
of productivity and survival focused research that'sout there right now in terms of space

(08:28):
health and sort of the functional aspectsof working and living in space. As
we sort of shared our work,we've written a couple of papers that we've
brought to places like the International AstronauticalConference. We found that there were sort
of alternative use cases that we wantedto sort of test out and see one
is the design and engineering community morebroadly, so outside of the MIT community,

(08:48):
can we put our workout on theinternet and see if we can inspire
other folks to sort of use someof these use cases as ways to design
for maybe near or longer term spaceflight. We also have a really fantastic
conversation with an astronaut about the workthat we've done, where they'd mentioned that
this kind of this kind of toolor resource might be a worthwhile sort of

(09:09):
reflective tool for folks who've been tospace in terms of what they might want
to know ahead of time, aswell as like what's important to sort of
share and codify and disseminate more broadly, like a survival guide. Oh,
I don't know if I'd go thatfar, but maybe it's sort of a
daily sort of a daily sort ofslice of life so to speak, in
terms of what some of those experiencesare, like that out there as a

(09:33):
way of sort of, you know, sharing information about shared experiences as well
as things that maybe are sort ofhigher variance, where someone might experience something
in one way and someone might experiencesomething in another way. Because we prioritize
different senses, we have different culturalbackgrounds or we care about different things in

(09:54):
orbit sort of keeping not only thehigh level ideas but some of those sort
of little nuggets that sometimes end upon sort of the cutting room floor,
like what you know, Taco nightin space is like, you know,
not necessarily the subject of a researchpaper yet, but in some cases really
fantastic design fodder when it comes toimagining maybe the future of dieting in space

(10:15):
or the idea of cultural exchanging connection. And does most of this research you
mentioned a few papers, do youguys also have some of the interview like
clips or recordings available as well forpeople to check out or is it primarily
through your own documentation of primary resources? So we have sort of two categories
of research in this space, thefirst or the interviews themselves, which we

(10:37):
have sort of pulled insights from buthaven't necessarily published. Fully. We find
that, you know, both forthe IRB as well as for having sort
of a conversation with folks about whatlife is like outside of the mission,
that the format of the anonymous interviewwas helpful, and so we've sort of
synthesized and aggregated insights from those specifically, but from the primary source accounts,

(11:01):
which they're actually a tremendous amount.They're sort of scattered across the Internet and
in physical repositories. Consolidating those together, those are are much more much more
identified or identifiable because they're folks sortof writing about their experiences and then sharing
them in other contexts, and sowe do have this mix of sort of
anonymized insights in order to sort offacilitate candid conversations with folks but still share

(11:24):
things that are insightful as well asthese sort of transcripts and primary resources that
we hope sort of flesh out someof the bigger picture that are available but
in some cases really hard to find. Who do you feel is kind of
the primary audience? I don't knowabout necessarily targeting versus like, who have
you you know learned is actually usingsome of these resources. It sounds like

(11:46):
initially, you know, it startedout working a lot with students and faculty
to provide more of a foundation forthem and thinking about futurist design thinking and
that sort of thing. But howhas it grown or how's evolved to who
you guys are really trying to servehere or is there a direct category or
it's pretty broad. I'd say it'spretty broad, but the sort of the

(12:09):
spectrum that you've described covers a goodchunk of it. We started out with
that sort of design community within theMedia Lab, have grown outside of that
in terms of other sort of designand engineering practitioners. In a lot of
way, what we're doing at AraliaInstitute is an interesting test case of how
a resource like this might be valuablein the sense of sort of trying to
practice what we preach. Yeah,are you sort of a design consultancy,

(12:30):
would you say when it comes toauralia. So really Institute in terms of
what we do is mostly in houseR and D and so our primary space
or our first space habitat concept calledTessaay spun out of our CEO Aerials PhD
Thesis at the Media Lab, andis this reconfigurable, self assembling space structure.

(12:52):
And so that's the idea that wehave been sort of carrying forward in
terms of both the technical aspects ofdesign as well as the interior lived aspects
of design, because this structure isgoing to be pretty sizable, much wider
than your sort of cylindrical design thatyou see in spaces like the International Space
Station, And so a lot ofwhat we're doing in that case is using
some of the research that's been donein an academic setting and saying, Okay,

(13:16):
if this is something we know aboutzero G, how might we design
the next generation of a space we'dwant people to live in while experiencing microgravity
to account for some of these thingsthat we've learned. You know, what
is a sort of a personal orbody related design artifactor object that we can
create. What occurs at the scaleof the station itself. You know what
happens when you think about multiple stationstogether accreating to form a volume that serves

(13:41):
a lot of different functions. It'smuch bigger that we've constructed. And is
this imagined for professional space travelers expeditioners, or is it also imagining you know,
a future with more space tourism orthis kind of thing, or shorter
term residence or something like that.That's a fantastic question, and I think
it's a big question in terms ofhow we envision life in space moving forward.

(14:05):
As a space nonprofit, we're notbuilding for sort of the next generation
of commercial space stations, and thereare a lot of companies right now working
on that in conjunction with NASA andother space agencies. With our concepts.
Right now, we're working at aseries of different scales as well as a
series of different timelines, and thatmight be the best way to describe it.
In the nearest term, we've beenworking on spaceflight hardware that's about the

(14:30):
size of my hand, maybe alittle bit bigger, and developing developing that
hardware such that we can test itin microgravity environments and in space. We've
tested it on parabolic flights. We'vehad the great fortune of being able to
send some of our hardware to theInternational Space Station to see the sort of
self assembly mechanism work in zero Gitself. And so that's sort of the
very near term technical feasibility that workthat we do. But in addition to

(14:54):
that, there's sort of two otherworkstreams for testay that I think at the
question you're asking in terms of sortof near term use of a space like
this as well as envisioning that sortof like future life in space and what
we might want a space like thisto be able to facilitate a little bit
further down the line. So we'verecently, as of this January, actually
worked and published a case study ontessay in terms of fleshing out not only

(15:18):
the sort of technical requirements needed forthis structure to exist in orbit in the
near future, but also the interiorand design requirements needed to support a small
crew of individuals, either career astronautsor scientific researchers working in these case we
chose was around biology and biosciences insupport of NASA's current vision or push to

(15:45):
imagine commercial use of lower orbit inthe relative near term. We have to
take a quick break, but whenwe come back, Sana's going to explain
how something as simple as the actof growing and preserving food and space is
so integral to the human design offuture space stations. Welcome back to the

(16:11):
bomb Engineering a Path Forward. I'myour host's Magenta strongheart. Before the break,
you heard how the design aspect ofsomething as simple as living quarters on
a space station could impact the waythat future of space travel will function,
and how NASA is taking a seriousinterest in Sanna's work. Okay, wow,

(16:33):
so again, I'm like so manydifferent directions I could go. I
have like so many questions I have, but I'm going to try to focus
it a little bit you know,you said. One of the main focuses
kind of this design is thinking elaboratinga little more on having like a sustainable
food source it sounds like, anddining for maybe longer term. It's so
funny, it's like all relative,right, So I don't know exactly what

(16:53):
longer term means there, but longerthan missions so far, I imagine.
And when it comes to that,could you give us any is there any
kind of like paint a picture youcould do for us there? What that
looks like? Whatever you're willing toshare, I'm sure folks can find more
online. We'll definitely link, youknow, in the show notes all the
resources for people to check out thingsin more detail. But I'd love to

(17:17):
have a little more of an youknow, imagine what this try to visualize
it for myself even absolutely, Andthere are some fun resources online that we
can share as well. But thisis actually a good thing in terms of
connecting back to research that we didat the Lab for the Astronautethnography Project.
One of the things that we reallylearned was the importance of the dining table
as a communal locus in terms ofbringing people together, checking in making sure

(17:40):
everyone's doing well, as well assort of the value in ritual of breaking
bread in space and how important aritual that was in terms of tying you
back to home as well as connectingyou to each other. And while for
near term case studies we know thatspace is super limited, for the sort
of longer term vision of what lifein space might be like, we wanted
to sort of elaborate on that ideaof not only the sort of science and

(18:03):
biology behind growing food. One ofthe things we've been looking into is fermented
foods in space as a way ofpreserving and generating nutritious as well as really
tasty and culturally important foods for consumptionin space, but then developed designing and
developing spaces to bring people together inorder to share share some of these things

(18:23):
as well. So that might bethe bite sized version of that story we're
trying to tell. I love bothof those examples and the ways that dining
table and gathering around to break breadtogether, and this idea around the fermented
foods, like the really practical functionsof those, but also the kind of

(18:45):
I love when very in a wayyou would think old school or things that
have been around forever are still goingto be so important in the future and
still have a place obviously, youknow, in what it seems, you
know, emerging tech or these ideasthat sometimes seem very far away or you
know, oftentimes I think people justassume anything high tech is going to be

(19:07):
less human and these types of things. But I love that that's bringing it
back to no, no matter howforeign a concept of like eating in space
sounds, we're still going to wanta lot of the things that are comforting
and have been you know, timelessin cultures all over the globe, you
know. So I think those arereally beautiful examples. So thank you for

(19:30):
sharing those. Absolutely. I thinkyou hit it on the head in the
sense that like, we're still humanin space and ways to sort of represent
and share and connect with our humanityare incredibly important, but we get to
do them in new ways given thenovelty and exciting possibilities of the environment that
we're in, and that's the spacefor very much playing in. So I
would love to hear more about anykind of current projects you're really excited about,

(19:52):
or the future of where this isall going, and anything you know
as far as like what's next thatyou'd like to share with with their community.
Well, it's been a big year. We're a little over two years
old and we've done a lot ina very short period of time thanks to
a really fantastic team I really reallylove working with. I'd say the big
thrust of what we do as anorganization is that R and D and SO

(20:14):
we have had the opportunity to sendsome of our test orary flight hardware to
the International Space Station, which wasan extraordinary opportunity in terms of testing,
embedding the technical side of what wedo and from the experiential side. We've
been developing this testory pavilion an exhibitionsort of an experienced prototype that allows us
to show it full scale what aspace like this might be able to do
in house. We've also been usingthat as a kind of research platform or

(20:38):
prototype mounting sort of experimental tiles iswhat we've been calling them, sort of
functional systems that we can mount intoour frame in order to test things like
growing plants or maintaining fermented foods,or even sort of interior design and furniture
and what that looks like as it'ssort of mounted into that interior space.

(20:59):
Designing zero G has some interesting challengesto it. In some ways, there's
ah, that's going to be mynext question, like what does that really
mean? You know, it's areally interesting space to work in. In
some ways, there's a tremendous amountof opportunity. I think one of the
easiest ways to think about it is, you know, think about the space
that you're in in zero G.There isn't really sort of dead space and
then ceiling, everything is wall,everything is active, and so the room

(21:21):
that you know you are I arein right now is in a lot of
ways bigger than we'd conceive of itin one G when you have access to
all of it in zero G.But there are some challenges, particularly with
like large zero G spaces. Ifyou can't touch a wall and you stop
moving, you can't swim your wayto another wall. You're sort of there
now. And we are interested indesigning sort of multi story and large scale

(21:44):
zero G spaces, and so howyou get people to move around in a
way that feels comfortable and effortless withoutsort of constraining them to sort of like
you know, hamster sort of tubesor what have you. Can you can
you build spaces that are grand orsublime or or comfortable, but have them
be designed in ways that sort offacilitate some of those things. There's also

(22:07):
I think the challenges for us oflike what we learn at different scales.
We're building a zero G mockup inone G, and so the terrestrial engineering
problems we're dealing with to build ashape that's really well suited for microgravity but
is on Earth is actually a nontrivial one, and so we spend a
lot of time on terrestrial engineering asmuch as we do on the space stuff
that's super interesting in my mind's goinglike immediately visualizing ropes mounted to the walls

(22:32):
kind of thing for people to guidethemselves along, or different things like that,
fixturing systems for the furniture, anyaccessories in the space. Are you
guys getting as micro as those fixturesthemselves or is that something you'd use off
the shelf, you know, clampsthat exist or things like that, Like
where would you say the most kindof play is happening? Or is everything

(22:53):
like nothing is off limits? Youknow. I think given that we're working
on a bunch of different time scales, we do have the flexibility to explore
things that we feel are really meaningfulin terms of the mission and vision of
the ORG as well as the storiesthat we're telling with the spaces we're designing
for things like our case study.It is really grounded in reality in terms
of, you know, requirements forenvironmental control and life support system, a

(23:14):
concept of operation sort of your yourlife cycle of your station is envisioned.
Trying to build out as robust andnear term a vision for the structure as
we can For things like the exhibitionprototype, we can start to play with
things in terms of well, youknow, we know what industry standard looks
like right now, but are thereways to make that more comfortable, more

(23:34):
accessible, more customizable or modular.Being able to experiment a little bit like
that, I think is a perkof is a perk of the way that
we work, and trying to iterateand test those ideas is a fun challenge,
given that some things you can learnabout to Australia and some of the
things you need to you know,put on a parabolic flight or experiment with

(23:56):
in other ways in order to seeif it works the way you think it's
going to work. In environment likeseragy. Yeah, I can't imagine honestly,
the challenge of prototyping for one environment, you know, in a totally
different, like you said, ina space where you have gravity and you
don't have that exact, you know, environment to test. And I'm curious
how much kind of simulation tools youguys are using and if you're open to

(24:22):
speaking to which tools specifically have beenmost useful in the process, because we,
you know, as a community ofmakers and designers and engineers, everyone
loves their tools, loves to talkabout kind of what you know is their
go to. So I would imaginesome things are very you know, similar
to what a lot of engineers andmechanical designers are using. And I'm sure
there's some that's a little out ofour realm of the usual. Yeah,

(24:45):
that's fair, And I might sortof take that question in two parts,
like simulation is definitely part and parcelof how we work. In terms of
some of the trustrial work, whichis what I've had more at a handon,
we have been really fortunate to partnerwith Autodesk. We've been working at
their Autodesk Technology Center in Boston inorder to build some of these small and
then large scale prototypes as part oftheir outside network and we use a fair

(25:07):
amount of auto fusion three sixty.In terms of sort of prototype and CAD.
We have a fair number of architectson the team, and so you
have a lot of you know,rhino users and folks who are familiar with
that rhinograsshopper, as well as theassorted CAD and simulation technologies that integrate with
those. We have a lot ofpeople who come from different places and they
use different tool sets, and sooftentimes our goal is to try to figure

(25:27):
out how to get people to talktogether, how to get programs to talk
together, how to get systems tomake sense in context of one another at
different scales and different levels of fidelity. Always a challenge with interdisciplinary team,
and so a lot of what wedo is incredibly iterative. Sometimes the best
way to figure out something is tomake a prototype of it and break it

(25:48):
and see what we need in termsof performance. I'd say the other thing
that I'd really love to highlight hereit goes part and parcel with the education
program. When we've been developing,we have a fair emphasis on v able
to test our test what we doat different scales on events like parabolic flights.
If you're familiar with momit comments andtheir ability to simulate small chunks of

(26:08):
microgravity. It's a good way forus to test how we think something is
going to work at least at aparticular scale, if we design our experiments
well and vet whether or not it'sgoing to perform as expected. And this
is something we found tremendous value atboth at MIT as well as Aralia,
and it's featured pretty heavily in theeducational offerings we provide as well. We've

(26:30):
developed as part of Aurelia Academy whatwe've been calling our Horizon Zero Gravity Program
that involves a project course on howto design, build and test for zero
G that culminates in one of theseparabolic flights. We're able to pull together
like a diverse cohorative students to takea project from sort of soup to nuts
and then test it in an environmentlike that, because for all the simulation

(26:52):
that you do for certain things,experiencing it is incredibly worthwhile, not only
for your experimental results, but sofor sort of from an embodied perspective,
what you learn from being in thatenvironment. Definitely, that's a sounds like
a super awesome opportunity. And isthe student adrainge there is that university level
or what's kind of the program designedfor. Yeah, we've had a pretty

(27:15):
diverse group of folks actually in termsof participants, university level folks, some
masters and PhD researchers, as wellas a couple of groups that have been
doing fantastic sort of professional research.One group we've worked with called astro Access.
They are very committed to bringing amore accessible ethos to the space environment
in terms of having disabled individuals goto space, and they've been developing a

(27:38):
series of really fantastic experiments, Ithink in terms of demonstrating the ways in
which we might be able to designwith accessibility in mind when it comes to
space environments and space space related technologies. So that that's an example of maybe
not sort of your traditional course environment, but developing a cohort that's testing a
series of things in order to reallysort of try to open that door to

(28:00):
space as wide as we can manage. Just a question that comes to mind
as you're speaking on this. Idon't know if this is something you guys
are focused on directly, but Iwould imagine it impacts kind of some of
the work you're doing are you familiarwith kind of the statistics on what the
like expected growth rate of kind ofthe space market is projected to be over
the next you know, I don'teven know ten twenty fifty years. Like

(28:23):
in thinking about this as a designtrack, a design education track, engineering
track, et cetera, how manyjobs do you see opening up? For
example? Or you know, Imust admit a field I'm not really that
familiar with. So that's all spindyingwith me. That's all good, that's
all good, And I will leaninto my lack of expertise in terms of

(28:44):
some of the larger statistical numbers basedon sort of my background in architecture and
design. But what I can sayis the ways in which we're working in
terms of designing and building for spaceare changing pretty rapidly, giving who is
going to space and why. Inthe past, you know, two decades
alone, we've gone from predominantly supportinga very small class of the most resilient
humans on Earth going to space predominantlyfor research, to supporting things like space

(29:10):
tourism, supporting sort of more nicheresearch cases, having private astronauts going through
channels that aren't necessarily NASA in orderto or another space agency to get exposure
to the space environment. And givenall of these university of factors, I
think there's a fair opportunity to imaginesort of how the space workforce is going

(29:30):
to change as a result. Giventhat we are designing for different people with
different levels of expertise, from differentbackgrounds, and going to space for different
reasons, we do need to approachhow we design and build differently, and
so I think there is tremendous opportunityfrom an education perspective to think through if
you're interested in the field of spacearchitecture, it's really going to take a
village of pretty diverse folks in orderto make something like this real. So

(29:53):
there are a bunch of different avenuesthat you may come through in order to
in order to participate in the ecosystemitself. Things are changing very quickly totally.
I feel like we've only really touchedon this maybe with one of our
other interviews. So I'm really excitedfor younger people, and well not not
even necessarily younger people, anyone who'syou know, curious and interested in this
to learn more about this, asyou know, a discipline, to really

(30:14):
explore and get into because I don'tknow if it's you know, really as
obvious there comes to mind as anopportunity that's out there, but it sounds,
you know like there really is anexpansive opportunity there as you may or
may not know. Open source hardwareis a big part of kind of what
we do here at Design Lab andwith our family of kind of initiatives with

(30:37):
Hackaday under the supply fram umbrella,and so i'd love to hear from you
sort of why you guys value opensource and why that's been a part of
the mission and how you operate.I think that's a fantastic question, and
it's and it's a challenging one inspace. Given how space is traditionally worked,
it's been a fairly closed environment,and some of that comes down to
safety and security, which makes alot of sense. Some of that can

(31:00):
down to sort of like expertise that'sreally hard to sort of transmit and pass
on. But given that inflection pointthat we're at in terms of the ways
in which we're designing and building forspace changing, I think there's a lot
of opportunity to open the doors towho gets to have a voice and who
gets to contribute to environments like this. That's the change that I'd like to
see, And so at least froma design perspective, it's something that we've

(31:25):
cared about on the MIT side,It's something that we care about on the
ARALIA side. How can we sharesort of the possibilities of what we might
be able to design and build andinvite more people to participate in some of
those conversations, to participate in someof those design activities. Given that we
are sort of envisioning a future thatwe're hoping to have more people included into,

(31:45):
having those voices as part of thedesign process is incredibly important, and
so I think that's a lot ofwhat motivates us in terms of trying to
make accessible a lot of what we'velearned in order to broaden some of that
access and build up sort of whatwe'd hope to see that future workforce in
that future sort of space habitat Athleteto look like. Definitely, that makes
a lot of sense, and Ilove that it really comes down to accessibility

(32:07):
and kind of democratizing this discipline andhuge area for opportunity. Awesome, Well,
thank you so much. Without furtherado, we'll wrap up with some
of our quicker questions here, whatis your favorite part of your job?
Like I said, I think thatthis is a career I've rarely thought of,
and I think a lot of folksare probably, like you know,

(32:29):
their brains are just exploding with thepossibilities. So I'd love to hear what
your favorite part is. I feelextremely fortunate to have the job that I
have, and I think if you'dasked me sort of envisioning this moving forward,
I think the idea of being ableto work on sort of physics,
anthropology, and architecture, which arethe three things I was really excited about
starting school, has been incredibly fruitfuland incredibly exciting. But if I'm honest,

(32:52):
and it is the kitschy answer,but I will be honest here,
the thing that I love most aboutmy job is the team started off fairly
small. I was designed higher numberone. The engineering work started off with
me and our CEO and a designengineer. And starting from that point where

(33:13):
all of us were doing just abouteverything we know, machined a lot of
that, a lot of our structureby hand. We were doing any work
that needed to be done. Everyonehad a hand on the football going from
that small team and building a buildingtogether a group of incredibly fantastic, incredibly
talented people who were all incredibly willingto try new things and to experiment and

(33:37):
push sort of what their traditional disciplineswould have have have brought them to do.
Has been so so fruitful and soexciting and has made our work so
much stronger. And they're all lovelypeople as well. I've been really proud
of the team culture that we've beenable to craft, so definitely the people
that we've been able to bring tothe table feels very much like in a

(34:00):
microcosm of some of what we believein is an org in terms of bringing
diverse perspectives to the table in orderto build something greater than you can do
individually. Yeah, that's super beautifuland I can totally relate to kind of
that, the special experience of gettingto grow something and be there kind of
from the beginning when it's a fewpeople, it's a lean machine, and
then getting to really scale and bea part of building that kind of family

(34:24):
within the work you're doing. AndYeah, that's awesome. So that's great
to hear. What is something outsideof technology that's inspiring you right now.
That's a fair question. So I'vejust moved to Seattle from the East Coast,
and so I think the thing thathas been sort of top of my
non technology related has been the natureout here. I grew up in the

(34:45):
Boston area, and so the ideathat I can, you know, walk
from my house to the grocery storeand on a clear day sea mountaineer is
mind boggling to me, is aweinspiring to me. And so I've been
incredibly excited to get out into tothe natural world outside of Seattle and explore.
But that new environment has been incrediblyinvigorating as I've been learning a little

(35:07):
bit more about my new home.Yeah, absolutely, nothing like switching up
the scenery to really like be reinspired. And it's magical, Like we don't
have mountains like that on the EastCoast. It's genuinely it is so confusing
an onspire. Yeah, very muchlike larger than life, truly kind of
walking around mountains like that. Absolutelyall right, And last, but not

(35:30):
least, what's on your personal filmmaterials? Ooh, that is a good
question. And I spend a lotof time thinking about bill of materials for
my job, but personally given thatI've just moved. The thing that I'm
working on right now is building outmy little personal workshop at home. Now
that I'm here, I spend alot of time on the computer and on

(35:51):
meetings, and so I like tomake sure that I have a little bit
of time every day to build withmy hands and do something either for the
home or for work or for apersonal project. And so have on my
list a couple of couple of woodworkingtools in terms of orbital and jigsaws.
If this is a dream, dreamscenario, it is getting a desktop laser
cutter and a three D printer sothat I can do a little bit more

(36:12):
sort of parametric and CAD based designand building. But yeah, just building
out that shop so that I canfor a type in person as well as
sort of work digitally. Very cool. Love that answer to near and dear
to my heart. I'm always dreamingabout what my personal woodshop is going to
be when I have the space andthe budget to build it out. So
happy for you that you're getting tomake that happen. It's very small,

(36:36):
but it's the dream, and Itotally understand how that can make the work
life balance and everything in between.That much better. So that's great.
Well, thank you so much.Like I said, my mind is just
spinning with so many more questions andthings, but we'll have to wrap it
up here. I'm going to goon like a total rabbit hole deep dive
into the website and all the resourcesyou guys have available, and definitely going

(36:59):
to follow more in the future.I'm already thinking about how we might be
able to tap one of you oryour team to speak at one of our
conferences. I think that this isonly the beginning of how much I'm sure
our community wants to learn from youall and what you're doing. It's really
interesting, exciting stuff. And appreciateyour patience and your insights and willingness to
be here with me today. Thankyou so much for having me. This

(37:21):
was so much fun. I reallyreally enjoyed chatting with you today. That
was Sana Sharma, the co founderand chief design officer at the Aralia Institute.
Her vision for space travel offers alot of hope for the future to
keep the human element at the coreof futuristic design and technology. This has

(37:42):
been the bomb, engineering a pathforward. If you like the Bomb,
don't forget to subscribe rate and sharethe show. Wherever you get your podcasts.
You can follow supply Frame and Hackadayon Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn YouTube,
and design Lab at supply Frame DesignLab on Instagram and Twitter. The

(38:04):
Bomb is a supply Frame podcast producedby Me, Magenta Strongheart and Ryan Tillotson,
written by Maggie Bowles and edited byDaniel Ferrara. Theme music is by
Anna Hogben. Show art by ThomasSchneider. Special thanks to Giovanni Selinas,
Bruce Dimingez, Thomas Woodward, JinKumar, Jordan Clark, the entire supply
Frame team, and you are wonderfullisteners. I'm your host, Magenta Strongheart.

(38:24):
See you next week. What
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