Ariel Ekblaw

to those installations.

And so a company that we spun out of our work at Aurelia called Rendezvous Robotics is taking the test array work forward to be able to do things at that scale without humans involved.

But on the habitation side, yes, I think we will have humans.

I think we're a critical part of exploration, what it means to find new knowledge for the sake of new knowledge and explore this frontier.

So I think it'll continue to be a mix of humans and robots.

I anticipate that the workers are less likely than people think from science fiction to actually live in space, steady state.

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.