Ariel Ekblaw

Could we learn from nature, from plants and proteins that self-assemble at a small scale and adapt us to the grandest scales in space?

We know that when you're in free fall around a planet, you have the sensation of zero gravity.

In that environment, forces like magnetism can bring together vast objects with ease.

So first at MIT, and now at Aurelia Institute, my team and I have invented a system to do just this, to grow space structures in orbit using autonomous robotic self-assembly.

The idea behind the method is to allow us to build reconfigurable space stations that are bigger than our biggest rockets.

Based on my MIT PhD, we use electropermanent magnets, very special, strong magnets, that bring the modular tiles together to dock, to rendezvous.

Essentially, think about space Legos with magnets that click, click, click, click into place.

Tesserae, what we call this space habitat, is a self-assembling structure.

So we ship the modular parts to their destination, wherever they're meant to be, and once the tiles or the modules arrive, they build themselves.

So we don't require astronauts or even robotic arms to go out and do slow or risky spacewalks and space maneuvers.

And from there, after the tiles have come together to form one buckyball, multiple buckyballs can dock to form a larger space station.

And the best part is that we have tested this in space twice.

Michael Lopez-Alegria, on orbit inside the International Space Station, helping us test the code and the timing and the pacing for dynamic robotic self-assembly in orbit.

From here, we build and fly and test, we iteratively prototype, we simulate the physics to be able to fine-tune the construction method.

And last year, we built a human-scale mock-up of our space habitat, and we brought it on a roadshow across the country.

What we hope to communicate to the public with these interiors is a life worth living in space, or at least worth commuting to.

Once we're in space, we can use the really unique environment of the vacuum, of microgravity, to manufacture things that can't be made on Earth.

In Low Earth Orbit, we're working with partners to use the Tesserae construction technology to assemble large-volume, high-throughput biotech factories.

It turns out that in microgravity, protein crystals grow differently, certain types of tissues grow faster or mature better, and we can even do novel drug discovery in a way that we can't do under the conditions of Earth gravity.

We know that certain key biological samples behave differently in space, particularly when they're floating.