Ariel Ekblaw

I have been obsessed with the science fiction idea of humans living in space for a long time.

Nowadays, I go by space architect, thinking about the future of infrastructure in orbit.

The bottleneck isn't rockets anymore, it's real estate.

It's trying to get bigger volumes of space stations in orbit.

Earth is the best home we'll ever have.

One of the things we're most excited for in the space context is can we off-world heavy industry?

Don't off-world the humans.

Let them have a beautiful existence on Earth, but off-world the heavy industry and slowly let Earth recover as a garden planet.

So if you think about how space structures have been built in the last 20, 30 years, it's typically aluminum that gets pre-built and welded on the ground.

And then it has to be squeezed into a rocket.

It has to fit inside.

What we developed at MIT that we call Tesserae are basically like space Legos that have powerful magnets on their edges.

When those Legos, these modular pieces, are released in space, they float together.

That's because they're in microgravity.

They're basically in free fall around a planet.

We have videos from inside the International Space Station.

We've tested the prototypes twice now.

We're about to go back to the ISS in early 2026.

Exactly.

Prototypes that help us test the algorithm of self-assembly, test the energy required to pulse through the magnets, because in addition to coming together, it's a self-correcting system.