Ariel Ekblaw

And we learned about tesserae, these tiny little tiles that make up the bigger mosaic.

And I came home incredibly inspired to make my work fit in that word.

Yes.

It's a terribly tortured acronym.

Never going to do this again.

Exactly.

You got to lean into the nerd dub.

So it stands for Tessellated Electromagnetic Space Structures for the Exploration of Reconfigurable Adaptive Environments.

Tell me that's too much.

I know it is.

Yeah.

So when you have a modular system like this, you have a lot of seals that have to really work well to be able to, for example, use it as a habitat to keep air pressure inside.

So we're designing a system of gasketing or clamps that would actually bring the structure in together and hold air pressure together.

And then the second of many things we think about is how do we protect the human crew that's inside this big buckyball?

So we're also thinking about the shielding that's required to provide good radiation protection.

Yeah.

So one of the interesting things about deep space exploration is we're going to have to be able to grow our own space.

agriculture.

We have to be able to be self-sustaining in a future space station.

And this actually does still come back down and benefit life on Earth in that example of our kind of mission-driven work that's focused on Earth first in areas that are torn by natural disasters or really resource-constrained environments.