Ariel Ekblaw

speaker

1,219 appearances 5 recordings 4 series first heard May 2025 last heard 26 Jun

Ariel Ekblaw’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson · The Future of Space Stations with Ariel Ekblaw · 29 May 2026 podcast

So we're trying to be ready for 2032.

That's exactly right.

And so we want to be ready for that 2031, 2032 timeframe when the commercial space station is up, the phoenix from the ashes.

We want to attach to that.

So I've been working on this for a decade.

I started my PhD in 2016.

So it's not like I could just turn this project on and have it be feasible in five years, but 15 years, yeah.

The 10 years we've already done, five more years, get ready to attach a proof of concept habitat, self-assembling habitat is the goal.

Rendezvous Robotics for the beachhead market stuff, they have to show that they can do customer traction in 2027, 2028, 2029.

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...

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