Ariel Ekblaw

And this is the elegance of self assembly in space.

There's no friction.

So the initial sphere that we're talking about, the buckyball, is not going to rotate.

What we're working on for the artificial gravity is more of what we call like a xylem.

You know those tubes in plants that go up vertically along the length of the plant stem?

We want to align a bunch of cylinders.

Xylem.

Xylem and phloem.

This is my, like, fourth grade memory from fourth grade science.

Xylem and phloem.

So this is separate from the self-assembling buckyball.

But for the rotating artificial gravity station, the paper that we just put out is a bunch of cylinders.

And you put the cylinders next to each other in a ring.

And then you spin that ring.

And what sets that moving is you're going to have a bunch of motors, basically.

You're going to have a bunch of traditional mechanized systems moving.

So we have a bunch of balanced ballast.

And the structure that we're doing is we're trying to think about, if you think about like a typical ring, like 2001 Space Odyssey.

In the movie.

We're sci-fi nerds.