Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thriving in the face of adversity, that's something the incredible species of our world do every day. I'm Chris Morgan. Join me on The Wild as we explore stories of hope and resilience in nature, and what they can teach us about ourselves and each other. Listen to The Wild from KUOW in Seattle, part of the NPR Network.
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. More than 60 years ago, the Soviet Union successfully launched the first man into space. Today, the number of people who've been to space is in the hundreds. Still, that's a far cry from widespread space travel.
I have been obsessed with the science fiction idea of humans living in space for a long time.
Ariel Ekblag got her Ph.D. in aerospace structure and design, a crucial step towards her dream of shifting space life from sci-fi to reality.
Nowadays, I go by space architect, thinking about the future of infrastructure in orbit.
Step two, Ariel founded the company Aurelia with two other women, Danielle DeLotte and Sana Sharma, to get more people to space more often and for longer periods of time. She says the challenge now is building in space.
The bottleneck isn't rockets anymore, it's real estate. It's trying to get bigger volumes of space stations in orbit.
Her solution? The equivalent of magnetic Legos in space called tesserae, structures that would self-assemble into large, livable structures in orbit. And Ariel says the reason she's so excited for more humans to live in space isn't to escape the Earth. I love Earth.
Earth is the best home we'll ever have. One of the things we're most excited for in the space context is can we off-world heavy industry? Don't off-world the humans. Let them have a beautiful existence on Earth, but off-world the heavy industry and slowly let Earth recover as a garden planet.
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Chapter 2: What innovative solutions are proposed for building in space?
No. So what are the hurdles that still exist to like getting this up and running in space?
Yeah. So when you have a modular system like this, you have a lot of seals that have to really work well to be able to, for example, use it as a habitat to keep air pressure inside. So we're designing a system of gasketing or clamps that would actually bring the structure in together and hold air pressure together.
And then the second of many things we think about is how do we protect the human crew that's inside this big buckyball? So we're also thinking about the shielding that's required to provide good radiation protection.
Your company has also talked about how space structures can be used for things like agriculture or manufacturing. How would that work?
Yeah.
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Chapter 3: How do magnetic Legos work for space architecture?
So one of the interesting things about deep space exploration is we're going to have to be able to grow our own space. agriculture. We have to be able to be self-sustaining in a future space station.
And this actually does still come back down and benefit life on Earth in that example of our kind of mission-driven work that's focused on Earth first in areas that are torn by natural disasters or really resource-constrained environments. There's a lot that we can learn from space agriculture and then be able to take some of those lessons down to Earth.
We just did a big space garden project with Daikin, one of the world's largest HVAC companies, thinking about how do you Keep air humidified. How do you keep it at the right temperature in an extreme environment? How do you get CO2 out of the air and turn it into oxygen for humans or the opposite for plants, right? Plants need CO2.
Chapter 4: Why does Ariel Ekblaw believe off-world industries can benefit Earth?
So we're working with some exceptional partners to put together this notion of a space garden? How would we actually do plant growth in orbit? And then brought this to the Venice Architecture Biennale earlier this year.
That is amazing. So this kind of work would, I assume, require workers. Do you envision people farming and doing shift work in orbit?
Yes, I think there's a mix. It's going to be humans and robots working together. So we call this human-robotic interaction or the symbiosis between humans and robots. In the future, we're already thinking about things like AI data centers in space, partly to get the carbon footprint of those installations off of Earth, but also to get really abundant green energy from 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.
So would the workers live their lives up there, eating, sleeping, and working, or would they be commuting?
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.
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