Ariel Ekblaw

example.

And I know that I can achieve that.

We also work really hard at Aurelia Institute, the nonprofit that I run, to give opportunities to people from all walks of life, not just women by any means, but really thinking about people who traditionally might not have had an aerospace door opened for them.

And through bringing them on a zero gravity flight, affectionately known as the Vomit Comet, we try to introduce more people to this opportunity to be part of the workforce of the space industry now that it's burgeoning so incredibly.

Oh, that's such a great question.

Thank you.

There's so much I wanted to say.

And it is, it's a really, like I said, again, at the beginning, it's such a good exercise to be asked to distill your ideas down.

But something I'd love to share with this audience is before the research that gets shown in the

talk happened, the missions to the International Space Station, we did six years of zero gravity flights, of lab testing just on a benchtop in the MIT Media Lab with strings suspending the tiles, learning how to actually do robotic self-assembly.

And so in a TED Talk, you often see kind of the end glory state and the most recent thing that got you there.

But there's so much development in science and engineering, so much iterative prototyping and failure and

you know, recreating the idea that builds into that.

So I wish, yeah, I could have shown all of those hours in the lab building up to the very first spaceflight tests that we did.

Ooh.

This is going to come from my physics background.

I like it to feel elegant, something that we think a lot about in math and physics, something that doesn't feel kludgy, doesn't feel over-engineered or over-innovated.

It's something that is maybe a new as yet unknown idea that is an elegant solution to a problem.

And sometimes it speaks for itself and sometimes you have to really search for it, but that's probably what first comes to mind.

I don't know if this counts, but I recently moved to New York.