Ariel Ekblaw

So whether it's exceptional quality organoids for testing Alzheimer's drugs or cancer drugs or artificial retinas that would cure macular degeneration, these therapies would be made in space, stabilized and brought back down to Earth.

A little bit further out, between Earth and the sun, we're working to see if we can help startup energy companies self-assemble thousands of solar panels in orbit, above the atmosphere.

Now, what this would allow us to do is capture raw, unfiltered sunlight and beam it anywhere on Earth, even at night.

This is like a flashlight from space, and it would fundamentally solve the storage problem for solar power, allowing us to deliver abundant green energy to the surface of the Earth.

Thank you.

These are some of the most responsible ways that we could use space technology in service of Earth.

My team and I have been working on an idea passionately, known for decades in science fiction as off-roading.

Not off-roading the humans, but off-roading the heavy industry.

We could let Earth recover as a garden planet for generations to come and use space infrastructure to do that off-roading.

And this future is a lot closer than you may think.

While space travel definitely feels rarefied, and in many ways it certainly still is, I bring dozens of people with me every year into microgravity on parabolic flights.

This is how NASA trains astronauts, affectionately known as the vomit comet.

It's more fun than it sounds.

And this is how we are training the new space generation.

We're building architecture to welcome more people to orbit, whether it's for a long weekend to see the planet from space for the first time or maybe for a career scientist to commute for a decade to work on a major breakthrough.

Rockets like Starship enable us to dream really big, to be able to get enough mass of tesserae tiles and enough people into orbit to be able to fundamentally scale up space infrastructure for the public good.

We know that the business case for space is here.

Governments are investing in space-based solar power.

Companies are investing in zero-g biotech.

And in the next 10 years, we believe that we will be able to deploy our first modularly self-assembling space habitat and contribute to a trillion-dollar space economy.