Ekblaw, Ariel
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Ekblaw traces her path into space architecture to a childhood shaped by ex-Air Force parents and science fiction (Isaac Asimov's Foundation, Neal Stephenson's Seven Eves), and frames her overarching philosophy as favoring "use space technology to keep Earth livable" over narratives of abandoning Earth for space. Her PhD work, TESSERAE, is a self-assembling space-structure system: magnetic tiles that autonomously snap together into Buckyball-like polyhedral structures, using decentralized local error detection and correction rather than centralized control, tested at roughly 3-inch scale aboard the ISS and now being scaled to 2.5-foot human-scale tiles with an eventual vision of 10-to-30-meter structures. She extends this into a broader case for decentralized, distributed space-station architecture over single-point, centralized designs, arguing distributed systems are more resilient to failure and grow more organically ("in fits and starts") than the trillion-dollar, built-from-scratch megaprojects that current political and funding realities make unlikely.
She describes three "monumental space architecture" concepts she wants to eventually build: a secular "space cathedral," a nautilus-spiral organic structure built from space-filling "plesiohedron" solids (like truncated octahedrons) that can be functionally specialized module-by-module, and a classic sci-fi ring world — alongside smaller projects from her MIT Space Exploration Initiative lab, including swarm robots ("astro ants") for spacecraft maintenance and lunar missions, an in-orbit extrusion manufacturing experiment for building long structural beams that would sag under Earth gravity, and the Telematron, a musical instrument (built by team members Sands Fish and Nicole Bouliane) that only functions correctly in microgravity. She discusses how motion intuitions built for Earth's gravity (like throwing a ball) have to be relearned in microgravity, drawing on her own experience across nine parabolic "vomit comet" flights, and is careful to distinguish true microgravity from a popular but physically inaccurate notion of "zero gravity."
On the practicalities and risks of long-duration spaceflight, Ekblaw identifies radiation exposure beyond the Van Allen belts and crew mental health/interpersonal dynamics as the two biggest unresolved challenges — noting NASA still has no settled answer on whether married couples or unattached individuals make better long-duration crews, and describing pandemic lockdown dynamics (marriages strengthening or breaking, isolated individuals finding new stability or struggling) as an inadvertent natural experiment on the same question. She covers practical life-support engineering — recycled water (including from urine), freeze-dried food supplemented by fermentation research led by teammate Maggie Coblentz for shelf-life and microbiome benefits, and lunar/Martian ice as a future propellant and water source — and discusses her own work on the SHERLOC Mars instrument, framing its astrobiology goal cautiously as searching for signs of past habitability rather than direct evidence of life (referencing Sara Walker's work on defining life itself as a related, harder open question). She argues that beyond roughly three years to a decade in space, artificial gravity via rotation/spin becomes the likely necessary solution to physiological decline, and that reproduction and child development in microgravity or reduced gravity (informed by mouse studies suggesting altered offspring physiology) remain open engineering and biological problems.
On Mars and settlement more broadly, Ekblaw is skeptical of Mars as a near-term Earth backup, citing McMurdo Station in Antarctica as the closest terrestrial analogue for a permanent outpost, along with toxic perchlorates in Martian soil and its thin, unbreathable atmosphere; she expects small Martian outposts to be feasible in the 2030s but argues humanity's larger-scale expansion into space will happen mainly through floating, self-assembling structures in microgravity (drawing an analogy to The Expanse's "Belters" developing distinct physiologies and cultures) rather than surface settlements, and raises open governance questions — property rights, national or corporate sovereignty claims, and "commons"-style stewardship modeled on how humanity manages shared resources on Earth — as unresolved and urgent given a "first-come-first-served" dynamic already emerging around lunar resource claims. She expresses concern that geopolitical conflict (explicitly referencing the then-ongoing war in Ukraine) could follow humanity into space, but sees international collaboration on space projects (citing US-Russia cooperation via the ISS even during periods of tension) as a unifying counterforce, alongside the psychological and inspirational value she attributes to space exploration more broadly (citing the Apollo 8 "Earthrise" photograph and Bill Anders' quote about discovering Earth by going to the Moon).
Ekblaw discusses the growing role of commercial spaceflight (SpaceX, Blue Origin, Axiom, Nanoracks) in lowering costs and democratizing research access relative to traditional grant-funded academic timelines, framing this as freeing NASA to pursue more ambitious frontier goals (Mars, Europa) rather than as commercial actors displacing NASA's role — and credits this cost reduction as part of the motivation for spinning her lab's work out into a new company, Aurelia Institute (a name referencing the chrysalis/metamorphosis stage, framed as an explicit metaphor for humanity's transition to a spacefaring species), which she announces on the podcast as a first public reveal. She closes on the value of interdisciplinary training (her own background spans physics, mathematics, and philosophy before aerospace engineering), arguing space exploration needs artists, philosophers, and "space lawyers" as much as scientists and engineers to address human-condition questions and legal/governance gaps, and reflects on meaning and purpose as operating simultaneously at a personal/familial level and at the level of contributing to humanity's broader, multi-generational project — expressing hope that space exploration's capacity to inspire and unite (rather than divide via military conflict) will define its longer-term legacy.
Excerpts
On the philosophy behind self-assembling, decentralized space structures:
“It's much more like how nature works, so it's a biomimicry-inspired way for humanity to scale out in space... I think the current political climate is such that you can't get the trillion-dollar investment to build the sci-fi megastructure from scratch, but if you can build it in fits and starts, in little different pieces — which is another advantage of self-assembly — [that's more achievable].”
On the open question of governance and property rights as space settlement accelerates:
“We are trying to figure out right now what happens to the moon with all of these first-come-first-served actors just arriving and setting precedent that might really affect future access... does that mean we're going to grant property rights on the moon to companies? Who has the right to give that right away? There's a bunch of really kind of gnarly questions we have to think about — which is why I think we need space lawyers.”
On why she believes floating, self-assembling space cities rather than planetary surface settlements represent humanity's more likely long-term expansion path:
“My best hot take that people would disagree with me on is life in floating cities as opposed to life on the surface... I think low Earth orbit might come to look like [neighborhoods with giant and small structures]... beyond that, I think we'll grow in pockets where there are resources... some development around the moon, some around asteroids, some around Mars.”