Ariel Ekblaw

You can finally, with this architecture, make something the size of four football fields that you could never origami up into a single rocket.

Origami is a verb.

I origami.

Do we all origami?

So we have spun out a company to do this.

So my passion for my life is habitats.

I really want to scale humans in space with this curved surface.

It's what we get taught to do.

So we spun out Rendezvous Robotics.

They're going to focus on what we call the beachhead market, so big, massive, flat things in space, like solar panels, radiators, AI data centers, maybe big communication antennas to get really big apertures, much bigger than you could have gotten, again, having to squeeze it up into a rocket.

So Rendezvous Robotics does that, and then I'm going to keep the nonprofit to do future work on space stations for human spaceflight.

For which piece?

Not-for-profit is NASA grants, a little bit of corporate sponsorship, and then philanthropy from visionaries who want to see a vision of space that is more inclusive, that is more democratized.

All two of them.

Or that they want to let...

Both of them.

I don't get any money from those two.

I think it's more that we... And I used to be really obsessed with science fiction when I was younger.

I really did want to go live on Mars and elsewhere.

Someday, I think that'd be amazing for humanity.