Ariel Ekblaw

If you can fly through a relatively more crowded part of orbit with some big capture area, then you can eventually amass enough mass that you will aggregate and then burn up.

So there's some serious efforts to try to remediate the debris problem and not just solve around it.

It's the drag, yeah.

The mass and then, you're right, I should say the envelope of this thing to get more drag from the upper edges of the atmosphere.

Rendezvous Robotics is doing a priced seed round right now.

It's a very early stage company.

The habitat work,

Oh, my God.

The Habitat research within the nonprofit, we think that we want to be able to attach our self-assembly module to whatever the first commercial space station replacement is.

They have to have a replacement for the ISS by the time they burn it up.

From a national security perspective, we're not going to agree to have no American or Western world space station in orbit.

So we're trying to be ready for 2032.

That's exactly right.

And so we want to be ready for that 2031, 2032 timeframe when the commercial space station is up, the phoenix from the ashes.

We want to attach to that.

So I've been working on this for a decade.

I started my PhD in 2016.

So it's not like I could just turn this project on and have it be feasible in five years, but 15 years, yeah.

The 10 years we've already done, five more years, get ready to attach a proof of concept habitat, self-assembling habitat is the goal.

Rendezvous Robotics for the beachhead market stuff, they have to show that they can do customer traction in 2027, 2028, 2029.