Outer Space: The Next Economic Frontier | WSJ

I'm Ariel Ekla. I did my PhD at MIT in

robotic self assembling space

structures. The idea basically being

like space legos that build themselves

in orbit so that you can ultimately have

infrastructure in space that is way

bigger than your biggest rocket payload

fairing. And something I like to call

out for people, especially here in New

York, if you're sitting in this room,

you are significantly closer to space

than you are to California. You're only

about 250 miles away from the

International Space Station. So

technically here we are closer to space

than Buffalo, New York. Uh which tends

to kind of surprise people because we

still think of space as very far away or

very hard. And so one of the messages

that I hope you all take away today,

particularly for this business audience,

is that space is no longer a sector that

may or may not be relevant for your

business. Space is a domain. It's a

physical emerging market. It's a layer,

particularly in low Earth orbit, that is

very close to Earth and now has amazing

potential to benefit people's day-to-day

lives in ways well beyond say GPS or

weather satellites, which we've all

become very familiar with. So today

we're going to talk about infrastructure

and architecture. You may be familiar

with space industry's love of Mars. Elon

Musk and SpaceX talk a lot about it. We

just had the amazing news about Artemis

2 historic mission. Astronauts went

farther out than we have ever sent

humans before, orbited around the moon

and came back. But what if we flipped

the script a little bit and said, "Okay,

it's lovely. It's really inspiring. It's

very important and motivational to have

these further out exploration

activities, but could we earn our right

to be a space fairing species by first

showing that we can take care of our

first planet? And so today's talk is

going to be about the infrastructure and

the opportunities in low Earth orbit

immediately relevant near-term

opportunities for building an industry

that would be profoundly beneficial for

our home planet and then hopefully be

the jumping off point for a lot of other

great infrastructure elsewhere in the

near neighborhood of our solar system.

So this is the current state of space

architecture. If you notice, it's all

essentially um aluminum tin cans. It's

pressure cylinders. And I always thought

that it was a little funny that you're

in space where you could grow your

architecture in any dimension and yet we

still do axial xyz

little coordinate planes for space

architecture which is a little funny. So

the alternative to this, how would we

change this paradigm? How could we learn

to build things that are not just

cylindrical because they don't have to

be squeezed into the tyranny of a rocket

tube of a rocket payload fairing? What

would it take to get to something like a

ring world, a much larger structure

often theorized in science fiction that

could actually encircle the Earth? Are

we that far away from this? It turns out

from a science perspective, no. We have

the material science. We have a lot of

the fundamental knowledge of physics,

orbital mechanics to be able to pull off

something like this. To be able to scale

to this kind of infrastructure though,

what we need is a different paradigm for

construction. and we need engineering

and funding progress.

So this is how the International Space

Station was originally constructed. This

is kind of a blowout model of the

current government space station up in

orbit. And the crazy thing is that many

of these pieces that you see in this

diagram were assembled like this

by hand.

So, astronauts doing an incredibly risky

and courageous maneuver in what we call

EVA suits, extra vehicular activity

suits. We call them that because a space

suit is essentially an entire space

vehicle. It's just wrapped around your

body closely. Building some of the most

advanced technology known to humankind

by hand. And this is kind of crazy. It

was very impressive for the first few

decades of human space flight. But we

know that this is not going to scale for

speed or efficiency or cost or even for

safety. It is a little bit wild that

this is how we still build in space. And

so for my PhD at MIT, what I looked at

was other ideas or archetypes for how

can you construct in a more autonomous

fashion really interesting things. And

it turns out from nature we have a lot

of lessons about self assembly. So there

are examples of how DNA self assembles

uh protein and DNA self assembles in

your cells in your body all the way up

to ants and termites self assembling

into little bridges that can actually

span gaps that would be too big for a

single ant to be able to cross. And so

building on some of these different

lessons about pieces parts in nature

where the logic for the final assembly

is actually built into the constituent

parts. What I designed were these tiles,

self assembling. We call them lovingly

space Legos where there's intelligence

built into each unit that helps all of

the units come together in some type of

a predetermined shape that can also grow

and scale a lot like this plant that

you're seeing on the screen. So, I'm

going to play a video for you that is an

artist's render of the work behind this

concept to enable really massive scale

self assembly of space structures. and

then we'll get into the tech and some of

the investment opportunities and

business opportunities that we hope will

come out of this kind of innovation.

So, I'm going to talk over the video a

little bit as you guys see it. So, we're

situating ourselves here in orbit around

the Earth. You're going to see a rocket

take off. This was modeled on a Falcon

9. So, we can do this even before Space

X's Starship becomes operational.

This could stay in orbit around the

Earth. It could go to the moon. In this

case, you're going to see it go all the

way to Mars. It doesn't really matter.

We just want to be in orbit around a

celestial body. And that's because when

you're in orbit around a planet or a

moon, you're in freef fall. So, you feel

like you're floating, which is why you

see all those amazing videos of

astronauts playing with water and all

the physics feeling very different. So,

now that we've got to our orbit, you're

going to see these tiles that are

basically packed flat like Pringles in a

can or like Pez dispenser if people

remember those candies from like a

decade ago. These tiles pop out one by

one and they have very powerful magnets

on their edges. So what these magnets

allow them to do because there's

floating, there's no friction, they're

not being weighed down by gravity, the

magnets pull them together really

elegantly. There's no propulsion

required, which is useful in this case

because propulsion is non-renewable.

Once you've used up all your chemicals

that are on your particular propulsion

unit, you don't have anything left. And

so this structure allows us to passively

with just the power of the magnets bring

these tiles together. And once one ball

or bucky ball has formed, multiple balls

can form together for a future space

station.

So if that was the artist's render, this

is all of the engineering that actually

makes it happen. So I've been working on

this since 2016, so about a decade now.

First at MIT and now at my spinout

Aurelia Institute. We have this

combination ecosystem. Aurelia Institute

is a incubator nonprofit where we do

really far future space research and

then we have Aurelia Foundry which is

our VC fund where we can invest in

technology that makes sense to spin out.

This is some technology that we have

spun out. I'll show you a little bit

more where it's headed after this but

these are the iterations of how we

actually test prototypes like this in

orbit. So we start on zero G flights.

Has anybody here been on a zero G flight

or familiar with it? Affectionately

known as the vomit comet.

So, this is a plane that does what you'd

want a plane never to do. The plane

pitches really steeply upwards at 45°,

noses over, points towards the ground at

45°. At the top of that arc, you get to

float. If the pilots are good, you get

about 20 to 30 seconds of true

weightlessness. It is incredibly

sublime. And then you do that arc 30 to

40 times in the sky. So it's like a

roller coaster in the sky. This is how

NASA trains astronauts. It's how we test

our work before we actually take it to

space proper. So this is an earth-based

simulation. You're basically in a short

period of freef fall inside of a plane.

So we do all kinds of testing on

platforms like these on Blue Origin's

New Shepard rocket. Yes, Katy Perry did

go up in that rocket. We went about 7

years earlier, but sadly not myself as a

human, just our research payload. Uh,

and then we have graduated now to

multiple tests inside of the

International Space Station. So, we take

these tiles and they're smaller than

what they would ultimately be as habitat

scale and we test them in miniature to

make sure that we get the algorithms

right and the code right and the

autonomous self assembly with the

magnets right as a precursor to now

preparing to really build at scale.

So, these are photos. Um, you're

actually looking down at Earth through

the Koopa window of the International

Space Station. Those tiles are about the

size of my palm and they self assembled

into this beautiful little fuette. You

might be wondering why is it a ball? So,

this is a subsection of the ball. It

turns out that to get stuff to space,

the part that's really expensive is the

exoskeleton. It's the surface area

that's going to encapsulate the

breathable air for the humans or the

satellites or whatever is going to be

stored inside of it. And a given for any

given surface area, you want to maximize

the volume that you get on the inside.

And a sphere is the perfect shape. But

it turns out it's kind of hard to

manufacture a sphere and pack that up in

bits in a rocket. So, a bucky ball or a

glorified soccer ball, which is the

shape of that ball that you saw in the

artist's render video, that is an

approximation of a sphere. And that's

why we're so interested in that

geometry.

So, here's a video from the

International Space Station um from

years ago now. Actually, we've continued

to really progress through the hardware

and you'll get to see what it looks

like. So, this is an astronaut's hand or

two hands inside of a glove box while

they're floating in orbit.

You'll see the tiles be very gingerly

released. He's trying not to impart any

emotion to them. The field of the

magnets cause them to do this dance to

piouette and dock together. So if you

ever put your MacBook charger into your

Mac and you feel how it kind of seats

itself, that magnet seating, that's

exactly what you just witnessed live.

Now imagine that happening at the scale

of a tile that is as big as this stage

and then 32 of those tiles coming

together to form a really massive

structure and that is the engineering

work that we're now doing and that we're

scaling up to. So I mentioned before

that we have this combination ecosystem

Aurelia Institute and Aurelia Foundry.

So the nonprofit research org and the VC

fund. We have just spun out our first

company to take this self assembly work

forward. It's called Rendezvous

Robotics. My passion is really human

space flight and turning this technology

into habitats. What Rendevu Robotics is

going to focus on is near-term beach

head markets in the space industry that

need massive scale self assembly but are

not quite as complicated as habitats.

Turns out it is really hard to get

humans to be able to breathe in space,

do all of the environmental control and

life support systems that you need. So

rendevous is going to focus on things

like massive solar panel arrays in

orbit. You can get very efficient solar

power when you're up above the clouds.

Things like massive communication

antennas for the national security

applications for the US government. And

yes, maybe even AI data centers in

space. I think we can have a great uh

debate off the stage about the technical

pros and cons of this as a concept. But

because there is so much capital being

thrown at this industrialization of AI,

we would really like to be able to be

that partner that can support the

inspace construction at massive scale.

If you're trying to build something that

is three or four football fields in

size, you're not going to fold that up

like origami into a rocket. You're going

to have to learn how to do modular self

assembly in space. So we're really

excited for the future of rendevous

robotics.

Taking this forward within Aurelia,

which is the incubator, we're thinking

about this technology roadmap. So, we've

built a 30foot habitat mockup. It's

actually up in an MIT lobby right now in

Boston if anybody would like to come and

see. And then this is a little bit of

our road map towards the other

structures that we'll be building in

space.

The first application that we think

we're going to have for a habitable

version of this infrastructure in orbit

is going to be a replacement to the

International Space Station, but with a

very specific flavor. And so this is

kind of the next few minutes of the talk

is going to take you guys through what

is a near-term pragmatic, you know,

something that will have revenue that

could actually be generated in lower

Earth orbit based on this type of

habitat tech. So, one of the motivating

factors is that the International Space

Station, which we've been continuously

inhabiting since the early 2000s, is

about to get shut down. NASA has decided

that they're going to decommission it in

2030 or 2031. What decommissioning means

is carefully take everything out of it

and let it burn up completely. Let it

incinerate in the atmosphere basically

and be no more. Um, they're very good at

this. We know how to do it safely, but

it is a huge gap for the United States

to not have a commercial or in this case

originally a government space station in

orbit. There are some proposals to try

to extend its life. But what NASA has

been doing is taking a playbook that

they did very successfully with SpaceX

where they basically said, "Hey SpaceX,

we want you to get us to the

International Space Station. We don't

want to have to supply the

transportation anymore." and they built

up space as a success in being able to

do that. NASA is now saying, "Hey, we

think we've spent enough time as a

nation in low Earth orbit with

government money. This emerging market

is really finally starting to build out.

We're going to let commercial companies

build space stations in low Earth orbit.

And we NASA will go further out. We'll

build the moon base on the moon like

Jared Isacman, the new NASA

administrator, just announced. will go

look for life on Europa. So, there's

this moment right now that's about to

open up for the first ever commercial

space station operators. And there's

maybe six companies that are vying to be

the replacement to the ISS. It's really

urgent. We need to be able to replace

this infrastructure, but we should also

expand. We shouldn't build it in exactly

the same way the second time that we

built it the first time. And so what

Aurelia Institute is looking at is how

could we add a specific type of

capability here to a future space

station. So we would not be the entirety

of the space station. We would use the

tesseray self assembling tech that you

guys saw to self assemble a biotech

module. And this is why. So two trends

here to kind of call out and take away

from this talk. The first is just the

drop in cost to get to space. So 15

years ago under the Obama administration

with the kind of the end of the NASA

shuttle program, it was about $50,000 a

kilogram to get mass to orbit to get

cargo to orbit. Today is about $1,500 a

kilogram. And with SpaceX's Starship

coming online, it's anticipated to be

under $200 a kilogram, which is

remarkable. That's like FedEx. If you

can ship something around the earth,

cargo, not the humans, we're a little

bit more fragile, a little more

expensive, but if you can ship cargo

around the world, you can ship it to

space. It's really remarkable how much

reusable rockets have profoundly changed

the economics of space, which is why

it's plausible to have these massive

scale buildouts of say hundreds of

thousands of space Legos building

infrastructure in space because we can

finally afford to ship that mass up to

space. The second really interesting

driver is that we've had 20 years of

really beautiful, exquisite

biotechnology research that has been

done by the government and some academic

partners on the International Space

Station across a whole range of

different topics. And it's ironic now

that we're about to lose the

International Space Station, right? When

we could finally be scaling up cures for

cancer, organoids, tissue engineering,

all of these really interesting

applications that have been developed in

microgravity because it turns out when

you're floating, the science performs

really differently, particularly biology

because so much of our biology evolved

here, in fact, all of it evolved here on

Earth in a gravity-based environment.

So, with the rise of AI models, wanting

ever more data about biology, and the

opportunity now to build on all of these

NASA insights, and the drop in cost to

get to space, we think we're about to

see basically a little explosion of new

startups and new activity in this

domain.

So, these are a few specific trends to

watch at the intersection of biotech and

space. The first is tissue engineering.

So, a wonderful example here is things

like artificial retinas. These are super

delicate little structures that get

implanted by a surgeon in the back of

your eye. In the future, if this company

that we're working with, if they get FDA

approval, it would be able to restore

sight due to loss of sight from macular

degeneration or retinitis pigmentotosa.

So, basically, as you age, if your eyes

are giving out on you, this is an

opportunity to have a replacement of

your retina. The reason it works so well

is that when you're floating in a

gravity environment, the delicate little

layers of the retina, which take 200

layers of the super super thin layering,

they sag if you're on Earth. They don't

sag when you're floating. And so you can

get this incredible quality improvement.

It's like a manufacturing quality

improvement by taking some of these

processes to space. Second category is

drugs that are based on aging. So it

turns out in the zero G environment,

we've started testing these little

things called organoids. Has anybody

heard of organoids here? It's a model of

organs. So these are tiny little clumps

of cells that are artificial models of

bigger organs in your body. It's really

important because it allows scientists

to grow them artificially without having

to practice on real organs every time we

want to develop a new cure or a new

drug. And it looks like these little

balls of artificial organs, these little

things that we call organoids, they grow

better in zerog than they do on the

ground. They have better 3D shape to

them and they mature a little bit

faster, which means that that's a great

target to test cancer drugs and

Alzheimer's drugs on that tissue in

space. So really, really profound. And

then the most exciting example of the

three, which should be relevant to some

of you here if you're tracking um a drug

like Kruda. So Merc's current cancer

drug, $30 billion drug, like 30 billion

in revenue. Amazing drug for Merc. It's

a cancer drug. They took an early

formulation to space to figure out the

crystallizing the protein

crystallization in the drug and that

helped them take it from a IVbased drug

where you have to go into the hospital

to a shot that you can do as an

outpatient. Now what they used space for

was just to get the data to be able to

make this new formulation. They do not

have to manufacture every dose of Kruda

in space. So it's a huge unlock for

Merc. We're super excited to be working

with a slew now of different biotech

partners to explore this potential of

microgravity for science data that can

change your drug formulation and then

maybe eventually manufacturing of really

unique drug formulations in zero g.

So, if you're curious how all of this

works within a space station and within

this new model of space stations that

we're pioneering, these self assembling

ones, this is a little bit about what

the system architecture, what we like to

call in the space industry, the conops,

the concept of operations might look

like. So, you have this payload fairing

from the tip of a rocket spits out the

tiles very gingerly, one by one. They

self assemble into this bucky ball, this

glorified soccer ball. On the inside of

the soccer ball, we have outfitted it to

be a next generation biolab. This means

best-in-class robotics, uh, benchtops

for not just astronauts, but citizen

scientists. So, I usually say it about

this point in the talk, if you guys have

kids, your kids may very well commute to

space for work. And maybe not 9 to5

every day, but in the way that you would

go two weeks on to go do a study in

Spalbard in the Arctic and then come

home for two weeks or three weeks on an

oil rig and then you get two weeks off.

That potential is now coming for space

applications in orbit like this. And so

you could very well have your child or a

niece or a nephew be a scientist who

doesn't have to be a NASA astronaut

their entire career, but they get to go

to space to be part of this new wave of

industry. And so we are really

intentionally designing now because as

architects we have to think about this

20 years in the future. We are designing

the interiors of these bio facilities in

space to be more welcoming to a much

broader swath of humanity. And then you

see a little uh Dragon capsule. So this

is an example of a current delivery

vehicle that is part of the SpaceX

ecosystem that is able to dock with that

space station, bring up samples, bring

up supplies, and then take some of the

research back down, take some of the

samples or the produced activities back

down.

So we're coming to the end of the talk

here and I just wanted to call out two

really big picture ideas that I think

you can take away from the field of

space architecture which feels very new

to many people. So the first is I just

shown you this example of an orbital

biolab

near-term a lot of capital being put

into this right now. But if we take a

step back, the reason that space is such

a special domain to build in is that you

can make things that you would never

have been able to make on Earth. And so

I just want to show you guys this

example as one of the two closing

thoughts. This was meant to be Newton's

scenet. So it was meant to be a memorial

to Isaac Newton. It was designed in the

mid to late 1800s. It's a 150 meter span

dome. And those tiny tiny little things

that you guys see on the screen at the

bottom, those are the humans for scale.

This could not be built at the time

because it would be near impossible to

build an arch of that span. But this is

the kind of monument to humanity. If we

have ambitions as a society and as a

space fairing species to go out and do

really big things, this is the kind of

thing you could uniquely build in space

because you don't have gravity. You're

going to have other forces. You're going

to have some air pressure trying to push

out against a vacuum. But this is the

kind of incredible monumental

architecture that we could be building

in space. And so I really like to

encourage people to think about space as

this domain that opens up not a blank

slate, but an incredible new series of

opportunities for humanity. And it's

worth also thinking about this in the

context of what I call the

anthropocsmos, which we need to do a

little bit of better branding on that.

We need a slightly less of a tongue

twister, but the idea is to call into

consideration this notion of the

anthroposine, which is the era of

Earth's history where we've now come to

accept that humanity has a really

dominant role on Earth for good and for

worse. If we're about to go into our

next era where we will have all of this

opportunity and potentially a big impact

as a species on the near neighborhood of

our solar system, that would be the era

of the anthropo.

And it comes with really amazing

opportunities but also a lot of

responsibilities. And so at Aurelia

Institute we try to think of the balance

of those different opportunities and

policy work about the responsibilities.

And then the final idea that I want to

leave you with today if Newton's scen is

an example of kind of looking outward

and looking up and into space about what

we could build. This is an idea to

anchor us back on earth like we started

at the beginning of the talk. So there's

this notion in science fiction about

off-worlding, not off-worlding the

humans, but off-worlding the heavy

industry. So get mining, get chemical

byproduct manufacturing that pollutes

our waterways. Try to eventually get

those industries off of Earth. You can

do them in space in some cases in a much

more responsible way. It's not like

we're just going from polluting Earth to

polluting space. When you're in the

vacuum, you don't have a water vapor

atmosphere that's trapping a lot of this

stuff in the way that we trap it down

here on Earth in our biosphere. So,

there's a really profound opportunity to

begin to think of space as a tool for

Earth. So, space exploration is not

about abandoning Earth. If you don't

want to go live and die on Mars with

Elon, that's okay. He's allowed to do

that, making incredible progress towards

it. But we can also use space

technologies as a lever to help Earth

and to try to treat Earth well and maybe

eventually let Earth recover as a garden

planet. And I think one of the maybe the

first applications of this is things

like AI deniseters in space. They're the

first new wave of industrialization that

hasn't really been built extensively on

Earth yet. Maybe it's a great

opportunity to move that natively into

space. begin thinking about offloading

off-worlding that carbon footprint

before we have a big scale out. So,

there's some really interesting

near-term opportunities with things like

off-worlding.

And on that note, I just want to say I

think it's time to build. I hope I've

shown you a bunch of different ways that

we might be able to get there with self

assembly, future of orbital biotech in

space, and then also just these grand

ambitions that I think we can have as a

society, as a species around going out

to space and having great exploration

opportunities, but also thinking about

space as a tool for Earth. And let's put

space to work for Earth. Thank you so

much.