Ariel Ekblaw

They don't get to have the pleasure that I have of doing longer term research.

They have to really...

We've done two successful low-Earth orbit trials inside of the International Space Station where the tiles, we actually see them autonomously dance.

They do this little pirouette in orbit to come together and dock and form the structure.

The Rendezvous Robotics, our company, is going to do the first ever in LEO, low earth orbit, not inside of the ISS, but in free space, demo of much bigger, like tiles bigger than the size of this table, about five feet on edge there, next year in 2027.

Yes.

What we think we're going to do is pack them so the magnets are on the edges of the hexagons and the pentagons.

We're going to pack them flat like Pringles in a can.

And what will happen is my PhD, I studied, let them all out in one big swarm and see if we can get them all to come together.

It's too complicated, but it worked in simulation.

What we're going to do for the company is a tile comes out of the stack and...

It moves over.

Another tile immediately comes up and docks.

They're going to move out, and they will build a spiral like the reverse of peeling an orange.

And it's not going to be as complicated as 32 tiles that form a soccer ball floating around in a big orb.

Which is what I did for my PhD to prove the harder problem of how could you do a big, messy, stochastic system, semi-random system.

We're just going to, for the company, do very pragmatic, connected scale-ups.

Yes, yes, or Lego.

Magnetiles.

I've been told that my generation was Lego, so I always say Legos with magnets, but apparently magnet tiles are the new thing for kids now, which are basically flat panels with magnets on their edges.