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.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson · The Future of Space Stations with Ariel Ekblaw · 29 May 2026 podcast

I think the answer is yes and.

So we definitely want innovative structures in space.

We want self-assembling modular things.

The reason we want modularity that's not just 3D printed, because when it's 3D printed, it's solid.

If you get damage on one of my modular flat-packed panels that have since popped out of their can, self-assembled, you can remove a tile, pop a new one off.

Or if you had a window to mark.

It's Legos.

It's space Legos with magnets.

Yes.

It does.

My PhD at MIT was really inspired by ideas in biology of how nature self-assembles.

I was in between AeroAstro, Course 16, and the MIT Media Lab, which is very creative architecture.

Self-assembly, like how proteins fold with their body or fold up into DNA.

And then other examples of small units, like swarms of termites and ants.

Right.

They can take their tiny little bodies and bridge a gap that is bigger than an ant.

If they had a bigger brain, we would be nervous.

Yes.

Because they just.

He was just fact-checking us here, talking about these ants.

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