Ariel Ekblaw

Turns out it's quite hard to live in microgravity.

Your bones get weaker, your heart gets weaker, your shape of your eyeball changes.

And so what really I think makes more sense is that we think of these installations in low Earth orbit,

for example, close to Earth or between Earth and the moon, as places where you commute to do your work, to do the really special thing that calls you to orbit.

But when you're done with that, if it's two weeks or three months or six months, then you come back down to Earth and you still live your life on Earth.

There is, of course, a farther out future where we've actually figured out artificial gravity.

which is when you spin a habitat gingerly so you don't make people sick, but you spin it a big enough one at a slow enough rate that you can actually get close to Earth's gravity, and then it's healthier for people to live in orbit for long durations.

But in the near term, I think it'll be more like commuting to space than living in space.

This is a really important question for the space industry because at this particular moment, there's not a significant...

carbon footprint from the space industry compared to, say, commercial aviation.

But if we succeed in all of these launches, we very well may scale up to the point where it's significant.

So there's already some great research into cleaner types of rocket fuel to make sure that the prevalence of launches, if we get a higher frequency of launch cadence off of Earth, that it doesn't contribute to a really serious additional carbon footprint.

Space debris is one of these really important problems that we're facing in the space industry.

It's an early tragedy of the commons from all the prior launches that have gone up.

There's a couple of different ways to deal with it.

One, we have to stem the tide.

So we have to have really responsible actors who are no longer contributing to additional debris.

The FAA made a ruling that any new objects that are launched to space...

have to have a provable deep orbit plan.

You have to convince the FAA that your object is going to burn up completely on reentry and be incinerated, so it's not going to contribute to space debris.