Ariel Ekblaw
speaker
1,219 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 26 Jun
Ariel Ekblaw’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Interesting capability.
One of my favorite ideas is to basically have a space Pac-Man that goes around and, you know, metaphorically eats, but really just collects a big ball of debris until there's enough mass in that aggregate that it starts to...
be 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, a little Pac-Man.
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.
Yes.
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 through MIT.
What an incredible privilege we know we have to be at MIT and get the chance to talk to so many astronauts.
And she interviewed astronauts from around the world.
So not just NASA astronauts, but from different nationalities, from private spaceflight participants who are not
government agency trained astronauts which is 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 living in space what was the most disgusting experience that you had what was the most profound beautiful heart you know expanding experience that you had and in particular she focused in on comfort and care
which is something that is not a combination often considered in today's space habitats because they're mostly occupied by unbelievably qualified, diligent, disciplined individuals, top, you know, .0001% of human talent.
If we're going to start welcoming more people into the space industry, into our Aurelia, Tesserae 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, life in space on the International Space Station is like sleeping under your desk in the lab.
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.
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