In-Orbit Manufacturing, AI Data Centers, and the New Space Economy with MIT’s Ariel Ekblaw

Ariel Ekblaw: In fact, we are sitting right now, we are closer to space than we are to California.

Sriram Viswanathan: You know, even if you're settled in Mars, that's never going to be as beautiful as the worst day on Earth.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes, Earth is the only planet where we humans have co evolved with the biosphere. We're insanely tuned, uh, to live well on Earth. Everything we send to space right now we fold up into a tube and, and that is the constraint. Those younger people like Gen Z, Gen Alpha could very well commute to space for work.

Sriram Viswanathan: Hi everyone, this is the Tech Surge Deep Tech podcast presented by Celesta Capital. Each episode we spotlight issues and voices at, ah, the intersection of emerging technologies, company building and venture investment. I am Sriram Viswanathan, um, founding Managing partner at Celesta Capital. If you enjoy Tech Surge, now is a perfect time to hit the like and subscribe button. And while you're at it, you can leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. If you're just discovering us, visit techsurgepodcast.com to sign up for our newsletter and check out the archive of some very interesting past episodes.

Sriram Viswanathan: Hi, this is Sriram, co founder of Celesta Capital and host of TechSurge. Agents are getting smarter every day. But even the smartest agents get stuck without the right context and tools. That's where Notion comes in. With the recent launch of Notion Agent, Notion has become the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side. And now the new developer platform is turning that workspace into infrastructure developers can build on. Between running our VC firm, working with portfolio companies and creating Tech Surge in, agents like Claude and Codex run alongside our team inside Celesta's Notion workspace. They handle drafting, research and prep. Our team reviews and approves. Everyone sees the same context. Notion is used by over 50% of Fortune 500 companies. And the fastest growing companies like OpenAI, Ramp Clay and Nvidia use Notion AI to streamline processes and help their teams stay ahead. Learn more about Notion's developer platform today at, uh, notion.comtechsurge that's all lowercase letters notion.com techsurge to try Notion's developer platform today. And when you use our link, you are supporting our show. Earlier this year, four American astronauts looped around the moon and came home on Artemis 2, the first crewed flight beyond Earth orbit in 53 years. On the way back, the crew photographed Earth settling behind the lunar limb, an echo of the famous Apollo 8 Earthrise photograph from 1968. Today, things are very different. Launch costs have shrunk drastically. There are now over 14,000 active satellites in orbit. The majority launched in just the last few years. Last month, Meta signed a deal with a startup called Overview Energy for up to a gigawatt of solar power beamed down from space. Data centers in orbit are no longer hypothetical. Today's guest, Dr. Ariel Egblow, is in the middle of all of this. She founded the MIT Space Exploration Initiative. She runs the Aurelia Institute, which is a nonprofit space R and D lab, an investor and an education Center. And her PhD thesis is the basis of her startup called Rendezvous Robotics, which is pioneering self assembling space construction. Ariel has an infectious passion and a contrarian view of why we must go to space. And it has nothing to do with leaving Earth behind.

Sriram Viswanathan: So welcome Ariel, Nice to meet you and it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Ariel Ekblaw: Thank you. Great to be here. Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: Uh, we have only tried to do this for a long time and schedules always, especially when you're working on fascinatingly interesting projects, your life gets very busy and so does ours. And so I'm really grateful for your time.

Ariel Ekblaw: It's delightful to be here. Really excited that m we made this work.

Sriram Viswanathan: So, uh, let's talk about your background. Um, you have a degree in physics and math and philosophy. Pretty unusual combination, but it sounds like you are an engineer at heart. Um, and you, uh, went to MIT, you worked on your PhD, which is really about space and construction and self assembling modular, um, construction, uh, in space. Um, and these are all fascinating things to get into, especially in the current times when everybody's talking about data center in the space and massive scale space infrastructure. Exactly. And how to repeat all of that. But before we talk about it, I went back and looked at your background and I know that your parents, your mother was a female instructor pilot.

Ariel Ekblaw: Mhm.

Sriram Viswanathan: But what I found interesting is that your great grandfather has a glacier in Arctic named after him and a mountain in Antarctica. I mean, tell me about this. I mean you have grown in that sort of an environment all your life.

Ariel Ekblaw: I grew up exactly in the family that was really passionate about aviation exploration because my parents were both pilots. But yes, my great grandfather, my Swedish immigrant side was um, multi talented. So he was one of those people in that era in the early 1900s that studied birds and studied geology and would go and do Arctic expeditions and, and so he famously went and explored this area of Canada and there's an Ekbla glacier named in his honor. And then one of his proteges became an explorer in Antarctica. And named Mount Ekblaw in Elmer's honor down south.

Sriram Viswanathan: So at family dinners you talk about, you know, not Thanksgiving stuff.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah, High bar, very high bar. I joke that if I don't name something on Mars, I will have failed the family.

Sriram Viswanathan: Uh, you know, really. Well, it sounds like you're on your way with all the things that you're are doing. But you know, I actually listened to several of your interviews and I also, I think as I mentioned to you, saw you at ted, uh, you know, a couple of years ago. And I found it interesting the way you framed the conversation, especially your TED talk, um, because normally people, when they talk about space and they talk about, you know, the final frontier and you know, it's kind of like a backup for the, for the Earth and all that, but you actually framed it differently. You said explore space so that we can live better here. Yes, so talk about that.

Ariel Ekblaw: And this comes out of also this childhood that I had which was reading tons of science fiction. It is very much focused on what you explained is that first framing, which is eventually we'll have to escape Earth or we ought to have a backup plan for when we want to live somewhere other than Earth. That is something that's important for humanity to think about on one time scale, but it kind of jumps too far ahead. One of the things that we can do as a species to earn our right to be space faring and to go out and explore further is to show that we can take really good care of our first planet. And I think that the other thing that we forget about from science fiction or that leads us astray in science fiction. Earth is the only planet where we humans have co evolved with the biosphere. We're insanely tuned, uh, to live well on Earth. So let's use space in the next couple decades at least to focus on helping humans live really good lives here. We'll learn a lot about space technology, industry, you know, industrialized building out of low earth orbit. And then we can earn our right to absolutely still go out and be a space faring species.

Sriram Viswanathan: So, you know, as most people, um, I'm enamored by space as well. And you know, constantly looking at everything that's to know about space.

Ariel Ekblaw: Charged.

Sriram Viswanathan: Exactly right. But the more you learn about the space, you realize that what we have here is the most beautiful thing we have.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes, right.

Sriram Viswanathan: So talk about that. I mean, why go explore all of these things other than the curiosity of where do we come from and all of that. But it is not debatable that uh, Even if you're settled in Mars, it's never going to be as beautiful as the worst day on Earth.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes, this is true. So I think of this kind of in three different buckets. Why do we do space exploration? There's the tactical like immediate benefits, which is a lot of the technology developments that come out of the space program. They are developed for the rigors of life in space. It's an incredible constraint to levy upon your engineering and it produces better products. Um, so there's a large history from NASA, things like um, you know, famously, um, some of the technology for water filtration that we improved on the International Space Station that can now be shared with areas with um, constrained resources on Earth. So that's the first bucket. It's just, it's tactical. We get really good tech out of the space program. The second is more strategic. We learn things about Earth and our future from going to other planets in the near neighborhood of the solar system. So we know more about greenhouse gases, the potential future for climate change because we went to Venus. We are able to learn and construct a better understanding of what might happen in our future as a long duration species by doing space exploration. And then there's the philosophical which is that space exploration and doing that act of leaving Earth and looking back on it and being really sometimes very emotionally profoundly moved by looking at Earth, it expands our concentric circles of awareness as a species. So the best example is Bill Anders in Christmas, uh, Eve 1968 orbiting the moon on Apollo 8. So basically what just happened with Artemis 2 looks back, takes this photograph of the Earth rising above horizon of the moon. That photo lands on the COVID of the whole Earth catalog and helps to spark the environmental movement in the United states in the 70s. Because it was this acknowledgment of this beautiful fragile blue marble planet that we ought to be taking care of. And I think we're about to have another moment with Artemis 2 and uh, Resurgence of interest in space where people can kind of begin to appreciate again these three levels of why do we do space exploration? Tactical, strategic and philosophical.

Sriram Viswanathan: I m mean the famous blue dot.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes. From Carl Sagan.

Sriram Viswanathan: Carl Sagan, which is perhaps the most profound picture and perhaps the more most profound articulation of how special yes, Earth is. So in your growing up, uh, was there a seminal, you know, obviously you're much younger than to have watched the moon landing.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: But was there other seminal things that happened in your life that sort of triggered you into on this journey?

Ariel Ekblaw: Two for sure. When I was quite Young the Mars rovers were happening. Spirit and Opportunity. So I remember Pathfinder and I remember these rovers falling on Mars with these, um, it was after Pathfinder with the big bubbles, bubbles that helped them land

Sriram Viswanathan: and then just bounce off.

Ariel Ekblaw: And they bounce off. And every single night at the beginning of PBS NewsHour, which must have been my favorite, my parents favorite show, um, they would do an update from Steve Squires at Cornell, who was leading the mission. And I still remember to this day, one night they were talking about the little blueberries that they found, the little spheroids that made them think that there had been presence of water on Mars, which was new, a new discovery for the time. So that was the first seminal moment. And then the second was when I was an undergrad at Yale. They used to have this program that NASA would run that would let undergrads propose your own project, fly it, build it and fly it on a zero G flight on the Vomit Comet. Vomit Comet, which is how NASA trains astronauts. And I got a chance to do it twice. And I was just completely hooked after that.

Sriram Viswanathan: As promised experience, I did not puke.

Ariel Ekblaw: I joked that my parents, two pilots would disown me if I puked on the flight.

Sriram Viswanathan: Uh, um, these were obviously suborbital. They are going at what, 20,000 or 10,000.

Ariel Ekblaw: They'd be basically the same elevation of a plane from 30,000 to 12. 30,000 to 1212.

Sriram Viswanathan: And so it's really happening in like you know, 5 seconds or 10 seconds that you're in in 20 to 30

Ariel Ekblaw: if the pilots are really good. And then you go through another curve and you're in 2G and then 20 to 30 seconds of floating and you do that like a roller coaster in the sky for 30 or 40 parabolas.

Sriram Viswanathan: I can imagine when they were shooting Apollo 13 or Gravity, they would have done it like gazillion times.

Ariel Ekblaw: Gazillion times, yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: So, so talk to me about when did you, so you did. You went to MIT to your PhD? Yeah. Um, and uh, so when did you get this idea that you want to work on space construction related topics and talk to me about that evolution?

Ariel Ekblaw: I was in a class that Neri Oxman, who now lives here in New York, an amazing designer architect. She gave this class called Design Across Scales and hosted Skyler Tibbets, who's a self assembly expert at mit, has one of his own, ah, architecture design labs. And I had already been thinking about space. My passion was I really want to do human habitats. I want to design architecture for more humans to be able to participate in science, uh, in life in low Earth orbit. And I watched this lecture on self assembly and I realized when I was in undergrad I had done some biology research and there are these incredible um, paradigms at really small scales in biology that allow little tiny things to self assemble with really small forces like how DNA comes together. And all of a sudden I realized

Sriram Viswanathan: it's kind of like the buckyball kind of a toy, right?

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: Like marbles and, and little rods that you attach.

Ariel Ekblaw: You attach. Exactly. And they, and they build up together.

Sriram Viswanathan: Right.

Ariel Ekblaw: When you're floating in space, because you're in free fall around a planet, there's no friction.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw: And although there is always gravity everywhere in the universe, you're in freefall, so you're not feeling it. Which means that these really big mega, uh, macro structures that we could build on Earth ship up to space, we could just float them together and have them autonomously self assemble into something much, much bigger than you'd ever be able to fit or squeeze into a rocket if you had to prefabricate the structure on the ground. So it's like space Legos with magnets that allow us to have these building blocks for bigger space infrastructure. And when we think about this space for Earth question. Yeah. There's a version of this technology that I would love to see in orbit around Mars and get us really further out into the solar system. But the first applications of it that we're most excited about at Aurelia Instru Institute is what's some infrastructure that we could build in LEO in low Earth orbit that would be really good for life on Earth today. And I think the first application is biotech.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw: NASA has.

Sriram Viswanathan: Hold on to that thought.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: Because I want to, I want to go back to what you said earlier as you're working on your research, uh, and Ph.D. and all of that.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: So to me the um, the innovation in the self assembling, sort of a construct that by itself is not new

Ariel Ekblaw: is, it's, no, it's combining really, um, wonderful lovely ideas from multiple different fields that have been around for decades, like programmable matter. Neil Gershenfeld's lab, uh, center for Bits and Atoms at mit. Brownian motion, which we've known about for forever. Yeah, forever. Um, but just the innovation is trying to bring these different ideas together in an environment where they were never considered before, which is microgravity space.

Sriram Viswanathan: But the notion of actually modular construction, even you know, the solar panels that are there on iss, you know, they come like um, it's like origami that just extends over a period of time. Right?

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: Uh, so to me, your thesis focused on the ability to take modular components that are self assembling with some software.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: And configure for scale.

Ariel Ekblaw: And configure for scale, exactly.

Sriram Viswanathan: Is that, is that the best way to describe.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah, I think that's a great way. The one thing that we did that was really innovative tech was we ended up developing our own epm, uh, an electropermanent magnet which allows us to have the, it's the driving force behind the self assembly. It's the thing that's pulling the tiles together. So we did do some really novel work, um, in collaboration, uh, with a mentor of mine who taught me everything I know about magnets. And that's really the crux of what makes this um, concept viable now for the future work where we're spinning this off into a for profit company. They're going to add electromagnets and maybe a little bit of propulsion to this original stochastic self assembly model that really um, was dependent on these special types of magnets.

Sriram Viswanathan: So, so let's talk about this. So this tesserae is, that's your, that you're known for that. So talk about what that is. What is tesserae?

Ariel Ekblaw: It's the worst acronym I've ever come up with. My PhD advisor basically told me never again. It's too much, too complicated. Um, but it stands for tessellated Electromagnetic Space structures for the exploration of Reconfigurable Adaptive environments. Basically what happened is I went to Rome on a trip in grad school and I got taught about ancient Roman mosaics and these tiny little glass tiles called tesserae.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yes.

Ariel Ekblaw: And I came home before where ChatGPT existed and I said I'm going to write down all of the keywords of my thesis and see if I can cram it.

Sriram Viswanathan: And you did.

Ariel Ekblaw: And I did. Because I was so inspired by this idea of mosaic building.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah. So you made the leap that this concept of self assembly somehow is more efficient in a microgravity kind of a setup. More achievable. And why is that?

Ariel Ekblaw: So as you get bigger, right. You want to self assemble something that's meaningful so it needs to no longer be at a micro scale. Once you get bigger, you have more mass. And if you're trying to do that in a gravity environment on Earth A, they're just gonna, the pieces parts are gonna be sitting on something so you're gonna have friction, they're gonna be Pulling like if I put them on this table, there's going to be friction against the table pulling them together.

Sriram Viswanathan: Right.

Ariel Ekblaw: But if you do it in space, there's no friction. You're floating and you're not feeling the um, kind of resistive force of gravity. You're able to just have these parts really elegantly draw together in a way that works at super tiny scales in biology, like in fluids. But then if you wanted to go to the, if that's the micro scale, if you want to go to the meso scale, all of a sudden gravity kind of screws you over on Earth.

Sriram Viswanathan: That's right.

Ariel Ekblaw: So to get macro self assembly, big scale self assembly, you have to go somewhere where you're floating.

Sriram Viswanathan: Sure.

Ariel Ekblaw: So ocean is an interesting uh, candidate. Turns out it's really hard to waterproof electronics. It's not trivial. And um, although you wouldn't say that space is easy. Yeah, it's not microgravity either. Buoyancy. Yeah, it's not microgravity. So you still have forces from the fluids and drag and that kind of thing. So space is kind of the ultimate domain to get a chance to test out this scale of self assembly.

Sriram Viswanathan: So, so you, you alluded to the biology of it. So, so obviously you know, in, in a cellular sort of construct there are lots of self replicating, self assembling things without the gravity part of it. But what other biological uh, systems were you inspired by to build this?

Ariel Ekblaw: There's a whole range of systems even at um, a slightly bigger scale in biology. Ants and different types of hive mind creatures exchange information sometimes through pheromones, sometimes through physical touching when they're interacting with their other buddies. And so one of the inspirations for the tesserae tiles for each individual piece is that we have lots of different ways that they can physically touch and interact. And then also wireless communication technology to develop something like a swarm hive mind in the self assembling system. So it's not just like a central controller, it's not like a human with a joystick saying this tile, go over there, dock with that tile, make a ball. The tiles do it on their own.

Sriram Viswanathan: Right.

Ariel Ekblaw: The intelligence for the structure that they're trying to make is built into each and every one of them and they have local knowledge and they can exchange their local knowledge with their neighbors. And that was really inspired from um, swarm robot dynamics and professors like Radhika Nagpal, who's another mentor of mine, she was at Harvard, now she's at Princeton, was on the COVID of Science magazine A few years ago for her, um, thousand unit swarm robot system, the Kilobots. Just really incredible work. So very inspired by that.

Sriram Viswanathan: I, uh, have so many questions about this. Um, so, um, ants, um, and bees. Ants, uh, you know, also do that, uh, where, you know, in the case of bees, perhaps there is a central queen bee that's coordination driving the coordination. But in the case of ants, there's no centralized coordinator. And I think you sort of are alluding to the fact that in this system there's no centralized control.

Ariel Ekblaw: That's exactly the goal. That was my PhD thesis. That was what was innovative about the science was showing that you could do stochastic or quasi stochastic swarm based self assembly. The realities of it, in deploying it to actually make it a habitat. We will probably have a central coordinator tile that's receiving data from all of the other tiles. So they still have that swarm like behavior. But there's no reason to necessarily force it to be entirely decentralized. There are also some pragmatic benefits to having it be centralized.

Sriram Viswanathan: You do have some sort of a centralized agent or a software platform that's coordinating it.

Ariel Ekblaw: That's right. We have, yes, that's absolutely right. We have an algorithm that is, uh, consistent across all of the different tiles. The state machine progress in the algorithm might be at different states in different tiles. So it's not that it's all completely at the same centralized, um, control algorithm all the time. But that knowledge captured in the algorithm is absolutely central to all of the tiles.

Sriram Viswanathan: Right. So, um, why does the universe like, uh, octahedron or tiles of that shape? What is the beauty of the shape of these tiles? There's some geometric beauty through the tiles.

Ariel Ekblaw: I can tell you're a physicist physics person yourself. I love these questions. So I was inspired by Buckminster Fuller and the wonderful story that he invented as an architect a shape that we later discovered in science, later discovered the C60 Buckminster Fullerene structure. And it turns out that for space, the stuff that's really expensive is the surface area of whatever habitat you're building, because that's what you have to ship up from the ground. So for a given surface area, you want to maximize volume, while a sphere is the perfect version of that. You get the most volume for the surface area. Very hard to manufacture a sphere. Very hard to pack a sphere into a rocket in parts. Right. But a buckyball, which is really just a truncated icosahedron, uh, like what you're alluding to is a panelized sphere.

Sriram Viswanathan: Basically, um, the Vertices are cut off.

Ariel Ekblaw: Exactly. Yeah. The star vertices, the little pointy vertices get truncated and then you get this structure, uh, that's called a buckyball. But it's also, it looks like a glorified soccer ball. It's pentagons and hexagons. So if you picture the black pentagon of a soccer ball surrounded by the white hexagons, that's what you're dealing with. Um, so it turns out to be a very efficient structure for space purposes, for volume on the ground. Of course, it has all these interesting, um, you know, force benefits because it's a geodesic dome in Bucky Fuller's original incarnation of it.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw: But so I was very inspired by the physics and the math behind optimal geometries. And then how could you segment that geometry into tiles that could be packed flat in a rocket, like, uh, Pringles in a can, and then released with magnets that then bring the tiles back together.

Sriram Viswanathan: So, so these tiles are inherently magnetic or they are made to become a magnet after they are unfolded.

Ariel Ekblaw: We, they typically will have the magnets already embedded in their edges as part of the manufacturing process for each tile. Um, so you actually have to kind of keep them, them apart while they're in their stack, and then once they're released, they immediately, um, want to bond.

Sriram Viswanathan: Right?

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: And then if you have to make a change.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: How do they do that?

Ariel Ekblaw: Ah, so this is the reconfigurable part of that very tortured acronym that we talked about in space hardware today. Most of it is pre welded metal. So by the time it gets up to space, you can't just cut a hole and move and patch it very easily at all. Same challenge with inflatables, uh, which I'm actually a huge fan of. I think inflatables are another great technology that the space industry needs. But the benefit of a hard shell structure like Tesserae that's modular is you can pop a tile off and you can pop a new tile on. As long as all of the steps that you take to get the structure to come together are reversible.

Sriram Viswanathan: Right.

Ariel Ekblaw: So the tiles come together the first time with the magnets. Then if it's going to be a habitat, we'll have clamps that come out from the sides of each of the tiles and basically cinch the structure in together to withstand the force due to air pressure that would be pushing outward. As long as we don't chemically seal any of those seams, we can reverse the clamps, turn off the magnets. Right. You can pulse electricity through the EPM and neutralize the magnet and pop a whole tile off. And that allows you to have reconfigurable architecture in a way that you could imagine if you're hosting a conference in space. And yesterday you had a window, and today you really need a docking port because you're going to have a whole other spacecraft come and visit you. You can do that. Reconfigurability. Even more important maybe is maintenance. If you get a debris impact on one of your panels, you don't have to reconsider the entire habitat. You can pop off that damaged panel and pop on a new one for repair or servicing. So we think this is a really interesting paradigm and not actually just for habitats, but the new company that we've spun off, Rendezvous Robotics, is going to take this technology of autonomous self assembly and do it for really massive things like solar panels, maybe AI data centers in space, things that are too big to fold up into a rocket, but also would benefit from this kind of modular repair and scale for assembly.

Sriram Viswanathan: So, so NASA has been, um, sort of exploring the inflatable kind of architecture. So if you were to say, I mean, the inflatable architecture, I mean, just for a layman point, um, of view, I think you could say, well, the, the micro meteorites. And so the material of the inflatable has to be really of highly robust. Robust strengths.

Ariel Ekblaw: Exactly.

Sriram Viswanathan: Um, but a priori, you have to sort of decide how big inflatable is going to be. In the case of these tiles, you don't need that constraint. You can work without that. Right. You can expand. There has to be some other sort of, uh, constraints with these tiles. What are those?

Ariel Ekblaw: The geometry that you pick for the target is pretty much locked in when you design the tile.

Sriram Viswanathan: Locked in.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah. And that's. Yes. No pun intended. Because the angle on the sides of the tiles are what determine the curvature that you get when you bring all the tiles together. So if you want it to be a bucky ball, you have to cut, you have to bevel the edges of the tile at a certain angle. If you want them to just be a big flat plane, then the hexagon edges are just flat and they tile like a beehive. But that is creating a flat structure. Right. That's very different than trying to create a curved structure.

Sriram Viswanathan: Right.

Ariel Ekblaw: If you want to do parabolic mirrors, that's a different angle. So you have to do. And so there's a limitation in the sense of, like, it's not like it's a build, uh, anything Brick. Just like if you pick a brick shape on Earth, you're going to get a rectangular prism of a wall. Once you define your brick shape, that defines some of what the macro target geometry can be. So we're hoping in the future with Rendezvous, that we have a suite of many different tile shapes that can do all kinds of different applications.

Sriram Viswanathan: It's worth pausing on the scale of what's happening here. The number of orbital launches have more than tripled since 2019, up to 329 just last year. SpaceX alone flew 165 Falcon 9s last year, more than the rest of the world combined. Venture capital into space companies hit roughly $12 billion in 2025 alone, up nearly 50% in a single year. More than 500 space startups have been founded since 2023. Things are happening at once. Acceleration of launch cadence, infusion of private capital, and the overall commercial demand. That's why this looks different from the previous eras of advancement in space technology.

Sriram Viswanathan: So, um, maybe just, you know, fast forwarding this, you know, whatever, you know, decades.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: Does this become the basis on which a Dyson sphere can be built?

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes, that's exactly the hope.

Sriram Viswanathan: Um, so explain, explain the Dyson sphere.

Ariel Ekblaw: A Dyson sphere is a concept postulated by Freeman Dyson, which is really a. It's a speculative concept. It was meant to be. How would we know if we were interacting with a really sophisticated civilization? They would probably have mastered the collection of all of the energy in their solar system. So they have some way to encapsulate or put a ring or a series of swarms that make a Dyson like sphere around a sun. It's a massive undertaking. If you think about the scale of the sun, how to construct anything at that scale that would capture that much of the sun's solar power. This is exactly the kind of technology that we would love to, to see in hundreds of years, maybe a thousand years, be able to contribute to doing something like that is.

Sriram Viswanathan: I just read that, uh, I, uh, forget if it's China and I'm sure our researchers can put this up, whether it's China or Japan. That was actually looking at building an elliptical or sort of a panel of solar, uh, arrays around an equatorial orbit on a LEO kind of a structure to be able to tap solar energy. I mean, is that something that is a natural application of what you're building

Ariel Ekblaw: or that I think is absolutely applicable. So there's one thing to do it at the scale of wrapping around the sun, but in leo, absolutely. Put solar panels in Orbit above the atmosphere so you get raw unfiltered sunlight. Um, we're investors in Overview Energy who just this morning announced a deal with Meta to capture space based solar power. So sun directly above the atmosphere, beam it down to sites on Earth that need a vast amount of power. And they did a deal for a gigawatt.

Sriram Viswanathan: Oh wow.

Ariel Ekblaw: Which is incredible. Um, so absolutely China had announced um, some interest in this in the last couple years. We've had American companies now for like the last decade working on it and I think it's going to establish a real race, um, which is good for the industry because it's profoundly clean energy from space. Amazing opportunity.

Sriram Viswanathan: So you mentioned a few, few entities. So let's just make sure we understand it. So you have Rendezvous Robotics, you have ah, Aurelia and Tesserae is really the project that you built on. So what does Rendezvous Robotics do? And then there's Swarm. So can you just give us the various pieces of it?

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah, absolutely. So started at MIT with the Space Exploration Initiative. That was what I ran when I was a graduate student. We spun Aurelia Institute out of that. That's the non profit. So it's where we do our research, it's where Tesserae is incubated. Um, we can spin out interesting companies from that incubator like nursery. So Rendezvous Robotics is the first ever company that we have spun out of Aurelia Institute. Rendezvous happens to take my MIT PhD for autonomous self assembly and my patent and they're taking that forward to do self assembly at massive scale for infrastructure in space. Um, so really exciting things like space habitat. No, no, no. For things before space habitat, things that have a beachhead market today. Um, like really massive communication antennas for the U.S. government. Um, really large format solar panels for things like space based solar power that you just brought up. Anything that is really large surface area in a way that you would not be able to fold it up and squeeze it inside of a rocket tube. So Rendezvous is really helping us break out of this tyranny of the rocket tube size.

Sriram Viswanathan: Mhm.

Ariel Ekblaw: So that's Rendezvous spin out from Aurelia Institute. And uh, they will grow to be much bigger than us. Like the hope is that they're a for profit, they're taking investment right now. They're doing a price seed round. Um, we'll really be able to take this technology forward in an amazing way. And then the other piece of the organization is we have a VC fund where we invest in early stage space deals called Aurelia Foundry. So sometimes we invest in our own stuff like Rendezvous and as like an incubator program. And then sometimes we invest in best in class companies like Overview Energy, that did not come through my ecosystem, but are incredible companies. And we're.

Sriram Viswanathan: And so you're wearing the hat of an inventor and then you're obviously managing the fund. And are you playing a role in Rendezvous Robotics as an operational person or.

Ariel Ekblaw: No, I'm a founder because it's my passion, it's my technology for my PhD and I'm chair of the board. But we have an amazing founding team operationally that's taking it forward. Um, so Joe Landon from uh, Lockheed, if you know Joe, Phil Frank from uh, Nokia, bringing a really great telecom expertise to the company. It's one of our beachhead market areas. And then Jerry Hudak, um, who's our new CTO from SpaceX, just exquisite engineer.

Sriram Viswanathan: So your, your timing couldn't be more fortuitous because you started all of this way before the whole AI, you know, wave.

Ariel Ekblaw: 10 years ago.

Sriram Viswanathan: 10 years ago took off. Um, you, you, you look so young, but you were obviously you, you did all of these amazing things. Um, but Even after the AI wave sort of took off in 2018, whatever, uh, there's more talk about data centers, uh, in space. Um, so let's talk about that. How does that play into a potential market that you can actually serve with some of these technologies that you're talking about?

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah, so we're really excited about AI data centers in space at Rendezvous because this is exactly the kind of massive scale deployment that you can't have a human in a suit going out and manually bolting together the server racks of an AI data center. Even a robotic arm is probably too slow to do every single joint and pick and place. So something that is a swarm that autonomously self assembles from a base repeatable unit to a massive array like a data center is exactly what we think we're going to need as an architecture for this. We didn't know that AI data centers were going to be the application. 10 years ago. When I was doing this research initially at mit, we thought probably solar panels. So now what's interesting for us at Rendezvous is the tiles can have solar panels on one side, the compute and the chips in the middle, and radiators on the bottom to radiate the heat so we can have a fully decentralized modular architecture for an AI data center rather than some of the other suggestions which have these volcanoes of heat generation kind of in the center and then piping the Heat out to the edge to have a big radiator. Every single unit for us has the energy input and the radiator output for the heat, which we're really excited about. I think in general there's a lot of um, excitement about AI data centers. It's not the simplest place to put right an AI data center. There's a lot of technical challenges. It's not even obvious that it's the best place to put them. Radiation has to be solved. The prevalence of replacing the chips every six months when you get a new Nvidia line, non trivial if they're now in space. And I think a common misconception is, oh, space is cold, therefore it makes so much sense to put the hardware out there.

Sriram Viswanathan: That's not true.

Ariel Ekblaw: Not true.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw: It's not cold in that way.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw: It's actually really hard to jettison heat off of electronics in space. All you have is radiative cooling because you don't have convection. There's no fluid going around you to cool it off.

Sriram Viswanathan: Right.

Ariel Ekblaw: So those are really serious technical challenges. But if we're going to see a massive amount of capital thrown at this problem, which it seems like Elon Musk and Bezos and you know, Philip Johnson at starcloud, they're going to do it, then there's a huge couple advantages which is if you can actually get this type of scale of infrastructure built in low Earth orbit, you are getting way more efficient free energy.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw: From the sun, uh, direct to you with no clouds attenuating your energy receiving. So that's incredible. And then the other long term benefit for humanity is maybe we get the carbon footprint and the heat generation and the electricity price issue, all of these things that make it kind of fraught to do it on Earth. If we get it off of Earth and we do it in space natively, then we're benefiting Earth from removing that burden.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah. So I mean you just laid out a whole, whole bunch of pros, uh, and cons for it. But I think the Dell is in the details of yes, you know, where does the break even really make sense? Because you know, data centers in Norway is definitely much better than a data center in Arizona for all the obvious reasons. Right.

Ariel Ekblaw: Or a data center in the ocean might be better than a data center in space for different reasons.

Sriram Viswanathan: For different reasons. But I think if I were to sort of break it down, uh, in some of the key pieces of technology that have to come together, uh, above and beyond the assembling and modular self assembly concept, there's thermals. There's energy, there's communication, connects to be

Ariel Ekblaw: fast enough to handle the, and the

Sriram Viswanathan: repairs, as you mentioned. So realistically, do you think this is something that you will see in the Next, let's say five years in scale? I mean the US is now looking at potentially 10 gigawatts plus of um, data centers for inference here. So if you were to be sort of crystal ball, when is a gigawatt data center, uh, with these various technologies coming together in space realistic?

Ariel Ekblaw: I think before we see it in space, we'll see companies like Overview succeeding in beaming power from space down to Earth. So you can think about it like a concentrated flashlight.

Sriram Viswanathan: That'll be like a microwave kind of.

Ariel Ekblaw: Or, or you're right in that it's funny. The canonical right way to do it is microwaves. That's the way they postulated doing it in the 1970s. But microwaves are really great because they're efficient and they pierce through everything. But it means that they're unsafe because they pierce through everything.

Sriram Viswanathan: Right.

Ariel Ekblaw: So Overview's approach is to use ir.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw: And frer, which means that they can shine it on existing PV arrays. They don't need new microwave receivers that have never been built. And it's safer because a plane can fly through the beam.

Sriram Viswanathan: Right.

Ariel Ekblaw: So I think instead of microwave, which would be the canonical science most efficient way to do space based solar power, I think we're going to see IR as the more successful pragmatic way to do space based solar power. So that's Overview.

Sriram Viswanathan: This is almost architecturally you would have a panel.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: Uh, which will collect all the, all the energy and then it'll consolidate it and it'll just collimate it, beam it down into IR into to a panel on the spot on Earth. Or it could be an A Leo

Ariel Ekblaw: or is it you're hitting on something really interesting. It can be to Earth or it can be to space. So you can do space to space power beaming, which companies like Starcatcher are doing. Amazing company, uh, run by Andrew Rush. Or you can do space to Earth power beaming. So Overview is doing space to earth. Starcatcher and others are doing, um, space to space. I think Starcatcher is leading in that domain. But what's exciting is I think those are stepping stones to then having the entire data center itself be in orbit and just receive the space power right there. So I think in the next five years we will see space based solar power companies begin to reach, you know, beginner scale for space power coming to the ground. In 10 years, I actually do think we will see installations in orbit, like an AI data center that are able to just, just be in situ in space and receiving power there. It's partly because there's this overlap strategically now in the gentlemen with really powerful companies who want power for AI, and the gentlemen with really powerful companies that have launch capability. Right. So Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, they are both really incentivized to figure out where to put these massive data centers from, um, people with launch companies. It makes a lot of sense to have it be customers of your launch companies. And I think it is good for humanity long term because it will teach us how as a species to build really big scale infrastructure in orbit, which we need to learn how to do for a range of different reasons.

Sriram Viswanathan: This is the perfect engineer's dream because you have different building blocks that are all on their own evolutionary path of innovation.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: They all have different, you know, slopes.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: And you have to somehow intersect for Gen one product.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: Uh, so if you were to sort of look at your own efforts for, you know, self organizing modular construction and you know, power and thermal dissipation and you know, GPU class systems being able to operate.

Ariel Ekblaw: Where's the early part of the slope?

Sriram Viswanathan: Exactly.

Sriram Viswanathan: Where would you meet? Where would it meet? I mean, what's the, the first gen product, uh, likely to happen when and um, what capability?

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah, two different key product areas for Rendezvous Robotics in the near term. One is on the government DoD side, which is how do you build really massive scale apertures that allow you to do communication and intelligence. I think that there's a scale that gets so big that you can't fold them up into rocket rockets anymore. So that's number one. We've seen a lot of really great traction there. Number two is massive flat things like solar panels. So even before a fully fledged AI data center would be in space, just the solar panels themselves to power all kinds of different things. Um, so really large scale solar, that's much bigger than the unfurlable category. And then the flip side to that is if you can do that, then you can also probably do radiators. So really massive radiator arrays to radiate a lot of heat. Um, so those are two buckets that we're super excited about in the immediate near term. And then shortly after that we think it's installations like AI data centers or other functional installations in orbit where Rendezvous, uh, robotics can be almost like a, like a business park. Like we begin to build the infrastructure, the Common utility layer that lots of people can use so that you don't have to design a full satellite vertically integrated just to get your science payload or your, you know, hedge fund earth observation data payload to space. You don't have to do everything on a satellite. You just ship something up to a business park and that's where it's sighted and that's how we think future of space infrastructure will develop.

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Sriram Viswanathan: So again I'll go back to the earlier question that I brought up which is, you know, let's say in 10 years there's you, uh, know, 100 gigawatts of inference capacity in data centers, sort of globally or needed.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: What percentage of that would you speculate would be space based infrastructure? 10%, 5%?

Ariel Ekblaw: In what time, year?

Sriram Viswanathan: 10 years.

Ariel Ekblaw: In 10 years. That's a great question. I think it completely depends on does the capital interest stay focused on space deployments as opposed to oceans, or do we all of a sudden get permits approved better on Earth? So I think it's really hard to give you um, an accurate percentage. I could see it being supplementary. Yeah, I don't know that it will necessarily take over all of Earth based, uh, energy use, but I could see it being supplementary.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah. So, so let's, let's talk a little bit more about this space economy. So, so on one side you have sort of the AI, ah, data center cluster, uh, and then there's obviously extraction, mineral, critical minerals, from other, um, exoplanet, whatever, moon, whatever, and then of course space tourism, habitat for space tourism, uh, and then uh, satellite uh, or communication deployments. And if you sort of think about these different markets, you play a role in many of them in the construction sector side of things. But in the process of doing that you're actually solving or at least attempting to resolve a whole bunch of technical problems.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes, right.

Sriram Viswanathan: What are some of those derivative technical problems that you're solving which would become valuable for some of the other segments?

Ariel Ekblaw: This is why we started the VC Fund, because we were looking at the, all the technology gaps that existed to be able to achieve a really robust space economy in the future or even just a really robust life in space habitat ecosystem in the future. And so we want to use the VC Fund to plug those holes and support companies where we think there's an immense value to be had and good money to be made, but also a real mission driven opportunity to level up the space industry profoundly. So one of the best examples I can give you is if you think about uh, transit on Earth, uh, to go long, uh, but slow distances, you do ocean freight, right? But then once you get into a harbor, there's a space or, sorry, there's not a, um, space tug, there's a normal tug that takes you back and forth, right. To help you get around the harbor level distance in space. We have the ocean freight now, which is rockets that get you really far. But what we desperately need is a space tug to move you in and between different orbits, maybe to get you from LEO to CIS lunar space and back. But you're out of the gravity well of Earth for the most part, or you're partly out and you want to move around. The company that's doing this that I think is going to make a ton of money in the space industry is Impulse.

Sriram Viswanathan: Impulse, right.

Ariel Ekblaw: So they spun out of SpaceX, a great example. We love spin outs from SpaceX. The culture is just incredible. Um, and that is an example of we know that someone is going to make a lot of money being able to provide that service. And it was missing, it was a gap even five years years ago. And now there are a lot of companies that are also competing with Impulse to do this. But that's the kind of opportunity um, that we see with the VC Fund right now at this moment.

Sriram Viswanathan: You know, the interesting thing as you, as you talk about all of these things and uh, you know, if you were to sort of roll back the clock to several decades, Even, you know, JFK's sort of, you know, man of the moon, 10 year vision kind of a thing.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: At that point in time, I don't think anybody was able to clearly articulate the societal benefits and commercial opportunities that folks on the earth would benefit from. M those are all second order derivatives

Ariel Ekblaw: that happen or they're yet to come.

Sriram Viswanathan: In that era, yet to come, it was just, uh, GPS and mobile phones,

Ariel Ekblaw: a whole bunch of things, other satellites. We're really happy that we get forewarning before a hurricane.

Sriram Viswanathan: Exactly right. But in all the things that you're talking about now, it feels like you could draw a straight line between some of these technologies and things that can happen on Earth. Like the way you're talking about environmental things or prediction stuff that you can do and construction even. So, uh, is that a natural evolution of technology that over decades this happens where applications become much more obvious for people to sort of visualize and imagine or what has changed?

Ariel Ekblaw: Um, yeah, it's a great question. We ask ourselves this a lot in the space industry, especially for my parents who saw the moon landing and thought in their lifetime they would be going to the moon for weekend trips. So why didn't it happen in that generation and why is it happening now? I think one is people mistake the Apollo era and then our inability to go back to the moon for a while as a mistake. It was more like we jumped ahead unbelievably fast as a civilization. The computers that took us to the moon are way less sophisticated than the iPhones that we have today, which is remarkable. And then we lost the funding from the Cold War. And so space was really the domain of military, defense and government for decades, which shifted in the early 2000s with companies like Blue Origin and Space SpaceX coming online is the ability to take space really, um, quite profoundly into the commercial domain. And then the huge unlock with SpaceX of reusable rockets, which just brought the costs down so much. I talk about this in my TED talk, but in the, um, Obama era with NASA, shuttle is about $50,000 a kilogram to get to space. Now with starship coming online, it's anticipated to be $200 or less or less, which is like FedEx or DHL multiple

Sriram Viswanathan: orders of magnitude lower.

Ariel Ekblaw: Amazing. And if you can afford to ship cargo around the Earth, you can ship it to space. In fact, we are sitting right now, we are closer to space than we are to California. And that mindset shift is about to, I think, really hit the markets in a big way because the costs have come down so much. So that's what's different this time is it's commercial. It's not just military, defense and government. The cost is really low. And we've also had the benefits of a few decades worth of concrete imagination directed towards the space industry to understand what space could enable for us, like gps, weather satellites and now this next era.

Sriram Viswanathan: Well, it's very uh, timely given, uh, we're literally at the cusp of, uh, SpaceX going public.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: Which is going to be a pretty phenomenal company that really, you know, goes out of the public markets, um, with, with uh, with the technology. Because I do, I'm sure all of us remember 10 years ago or 15 years ago, nobody knew that SpaceX was going to survive, let alone, you know,

Ariel Ekblaw: be a success about that.

Sriram Viswanathan: He talks about that quite a bit.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah, they had an incredible story of him saving the company several times because their early rockets, there was a lot of iterative failure, but that is what made them so special, is that they leaned into that and then iteratively developed and prototyped and now it's massive, massive.

Sriram Viswanathan: So, so I guess my question was going to be, you know, while this evolution has really exploded, uh, in satellites getting launched and all of that, you're a lover of physics and cosmology and all of that, is there an unintended consequence of us just putting so much debris in space? And some of it is useful. I mean, Starlink with 10,000 satellites being out there has a material impact on astronomy, doesn't it?

Ariel Ekblaw: It does. And this is one of those things where we're trying to struggle in the space industry right now to understand how to be good stewards of the space commons. It is a commons. We don't want there to be a tragedy of the commons, but still use it to the benefit of life on Earth, which is Starlink might provide worldwide global Internet, which would just be incredible access to knowledge for so many humans that don't currently have access to that in the modern world. I do think that there's um, a balance to be struck and there's a couple things that are giving me some hope in this domain because the space debris problem is really serious. One is that in 2018 the FAA made some rulemaking that every new artifact that goes up, you have to have a provable re entry plan. So you have to prove that you're either going to remove it from the sky in some way or it's going to burn up on reentry. So that has helped reduce the proliferation of objects that are just going to become space Junk. And then the other is that groups like esa, uh, European, uh, space agency are really motivated to do cleanup and remediation efforts. So there's a whole bevy of companies, there's also Astro Scale in Japan that are doing great work to think about how can we do cleanup of the existing orbits that are, that are debris filled right now. For the astronomers it's trickier because every new object that we put up that's somewhat reflective is going to affect their um, view of the night sky. And so I think actually one of the really special things that's happening now is trying to define part of the backside of the moon as m a dark sky zone so that astronomy can happen there on the dark side of the moon. Which is actually even more advantageous in some cases because you can see things without the um, shining of the. Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: So it's not just the heavy industries that you move out to space. You even move out your exploration on astronomy and astronomy to the dark side of the moon.

Ariel Ekblaw: I think we should, we should maintain the ability of astronomy to happen on Earth. It's not like we should treat the moon as the, as the answer. We need to still preserve and get that balance of their needs met too. But there are new opportunities for astronomy on the backside of the moon.

Sriram Viswanathan: Well, I mean arguably with jwst you already moved most of the astronomical exploration

Ariel Ekblaw: or a certain type of it for deep field cosmology.

Sriram Viswanathan: Cosmology. So that's another area of uh, a market opportunity I would think for uh, folks like uh. Yeah, this is truly fascinating. So paint me the picture uh, of Rendezvous Robotics, you know, five years from now. How big is this going to be? What's.

Ariel Ekblaw: I think we want to be the next SpaceX. If you think about it in terms of paradigm shifts. Shifts. This first paradigm shift was reusable. Rockets completely transformed the way we think about space because if you throw your airplane away every time you land in London, makes no sense. Um, but that was completely crazy. Everybody thought he was absolutely nuts. Then pulls this off in an incredible degree. I think the next paradigm shift is everything we spend send to space right now we fold up into a tube and that is the constraint. And it adds a lot of um, potential for mistakes because all of those joints that have to unfurl very complicated. And it also just constrains the ambition of humanity for how big we can build. What about a ring world? If we wanted to build a ring world. You're not going to do that. Tiny launch by tiny launch by tiny launch. You're Going to do it with bricks, with modular pieces. So I think in five years Rendezvous Robotics, if we're lucky, will be on the trajectory of this next paradigm shifting company and really want to follow in the footsteps of SpaceX and be another company that can, um, you know, incubate for a while, do our tech. Right. And then go public in a really big way. Not in five years, but after that.

Sriram Viswanathan: Well, I mean, but is it, does it also concern you at some point that uh, you know, the how like the HAL likes, you know, issues, you know. Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes, I do think that this is a problem facing all of humanity, not just space right now or an opportunity, depending on how you frame it. Yes, I do think that there's some really interesting, um, questions about how to do AI integration into the future of infrastructure. Are we going to build space habitats that are smart homes to begin with so that AI is so embedded in the infrastructure that you can't turn it off? That would be a how like dystopian future, or are we going to build them M in a way that are way more modern than the International Space Station is now. Um, more technology embedded, but still with the right controls for the humans to maintain agency and choice, um, and not have it taken over by an AI like hal? Yeah, so these are great questions.

Sriram Viswanathan: You know, those are, those are some of the unintended consequences that can, that can go wrong.

Sriram Viswanathan: Right.

Sriram Viswanathan: Are there others? I mean, what can go wrong in space? Well, in what you're particularly building and you know, there can be a proliferation, you know, kind of like the SpaceX analogy. SpaceX analogy is perfect because if you can do three to four orders of magnitude reduction in cost, cost and flexibility and reusability and expansions and all of that, that's a very powerful tool, case. Right, but what can go wrong?

Ariel Ekblaw: I mean, I, um, think one thing that we have to solve on our side if we eventually want to take rendezvous from the initial beachhead market, which is massive infrastructure. That's artificial solar panels, data centers, communications arrays to habitats for humans. We have to figure out radiation that can go really wrong if you try to push a future getting too many humans into orbit before we have the technology to keep them healthy and safe. So one is radiation, which we're making great progress in. We, I mean the industry, not me personally, um, but there's amazing research at mit and then the other is we have to figure out how to spin our habitats for gravity. Human body really does not do well in zero g. So as excited as I am about zero g, for this elegance of the self assembly, as soon as we self assemble the thing, we're going to want to spin it slowly, gingerly, but with enough force that you're getting um, or with enough um, diameter and rotation that you're getting centripetal force on the edges. And so that's something that could go wrong if we.

Sriram Viswanathan: And you would have to assume that you do that not after the whole thing is fully finished because that's going to be an expansive modular build out. So you have to start spinning much before the whole thing is built out.

Ariel Ekblaw: Oh, that's interesting. At ringworld scale. Yes, you're probably right. Have to start thinking about partial build outs for habitat scale that you're going to spin. I think you finish the habitat first and then you spin it.

Sriram Viswanathan: I see.

Ariel Ekblaw: I think you give everybody some period of time where they're working in zero G and they're commuting between Earth and space. And then once it's really properly finished, then you spin it.

Sriram Viswanathan: Um, how much does the human body require? Gravity or how many hours does it really require in a day?

Ariel Ekblaw: So the NASA astronauts, they work out, I think it's between two hours minimum to four hours maximum every day on a treadmill. On a treadmill to simulate gravity loading of your bones. Right. And they still come back, uh, with significant detriment to their bodies.

Sriram Viswanathan: Muscular loss and muscular loss.

Ariel Ekblaw: Heart's weaker, your eyeball changes shape, all kinds of crazy things. They do recover really quickly. But it's also because there's some of the peak human.

Sriram Viswanathan: Sure. Performance.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah, Performance and physiology before they even go up. Um, so if we were not otherwise spinning the habitat, if you were just going to live in zero G. We know we were talking about four hours a day minimum and maybe more, which is a big chunk of your day all of a sudden to just be exercising. So to spin a habitat, we may not need to spin it at 1G. We might be able to spin it at 0.8G and get, you know, a comparable amount of gravity back. But these are the kind of experiments we haven't done. And so this is the kind of work that needs to be done.

Sriram Viswanathan: So forward in your initial expectation. Is the habitat a LEO habitat or a higher than leo?

Ariel Ekblaw: What's, what's the LEO is a great place to start, I think with all of this renewed interest.

Sriram Viswanathan: A few hundred miles.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah, ah, ISS is 250 miles up, which is what's so funny. So we are closer to the ISS if it was to pass overhead than we are to California Right. Um, LEO is a great place to start and I think it's because there's work that I want to do in LEO for the good of life on Earth. I really want to build a biolab and scale it in orbit. Um, there's incredible value in microgravity biology that just, just can't be done on the ground. I think there's other manufacturing, microgravity manufacturing. So even if you're spinning the outside of your habitat so that your worker bees and your scientists are getting healthy gravity, the center of your habitat doesn't spin. And so you can still have zero G laboratory in the center and do all these amazing things for Earth like fiber optic cable, maybe eventually to your field. Semiconductors. Yeah, do really pure crystals. But then I think we can absolutely go further with it and think maybe there's habitats around the moon that are supporting this new moon base. Jared Isaacman has just had this big announcement on the heels of Artemis 2 that he's really shaking up how NASA's thinking about a sustainable lunar settlement. And I love it and I think it's going to make us much more competitive, um, to be able to chase that dream. So we would start in LEO and then try to expand to other orbit celestial bodies.

Sriram Viswanathan: How, how practical is it to do, um, you know, life sciences, pharmaceutical drug, you know, is there an advantage to doing drug discovery? Yes, you know, protein folding kind of

Ariel Ekblaw: experiments in space versus it's very expensive traditionally. And so it was a big trade off. But there are, there's the unique environment of microgravity that you cannot get on the ground. Right. We talked about the zero G flight. Best case you're getting 20 to 30 seconds. Biological systems don't respond on 20 to 30 second time frames. They respond on, you know, days and weeks and months. And the best example I can give you is Merck's cancer, uh, drug keytruda, um, 30 plus billion dollar drug. They took it to space and did a parameter sweep of these different conditions that would allow a more pure and consistent crystalline form for the drug. And they were able to find a formulation of the drug that took it from an iv. So you have to go into the hospital. It's a bad experience for patients to. A shot that you can do in an outpatient procedure.

Sriram Viswanathan: Single shot.

Ariel Ekblaw: Single shot. I don't know if it's single. It might be a treatment series perhaps.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah, but it's, it's formulated, formulated because of the zero gravity or near zero gravity crystal, crystal structuring, which is amazing.

Ariel Ekblaw: And this is, people have Been complaining that, oh, NASA's early biology work on the ISS, it wasn't commercial enough. Where are the success stories? But anybody in academia will tell you bio takes 15 years to figure out your experiment. We've just had 20 years of all this amazing work funded by NASA. And now we are having these incredible um, insights. Now is the time to scale up, to build a factory. We basically just need more real estate in orbit. I've been saying now for a while, rockets are not the bottleneck anymore. The bottleneck is real estate having enough volume in orbit to do these kind of things like scaling up keytruda. The nice thing for Keytruda is you don't have to manufacture the doses in space. They use the space mission to do the research. The parameter sweep of the different conditions. They found the conditions and then they're replicating it with them. I um, think they use little kleinostats on Earth, but there's a bunch of things that you actually can only manufacture in zero G, like artificial retinas. Um, red wire is now. So that's LambdaVision doing artificial retinas, red wires doing NE meniscus 3D printing those things. Actually the manufacturing process is taking place when you're floating. So you need steady state zero g, you know, research volume. And so that's one of the things I'm really excited about.

Sriram Viswanathan: These are fascinating. I mean to actually be able to take some of the work that Demis's group is doing on Alpha Fold and combining with this manufacturing in space can really uh, change the way drugs are made.

Ariel Ekblaw: We're super excited to look into working with Demis and David Baker and this whole community of A.I. um, protein folding insight and. Exactly. Get them some data that's precious. People don't have a lot of microgravity protein folding data to feed into their models. What if we did a new model trained on that? You know, fascinating.

Sriram Viswanathan: Let's talk about Blue origin and uh, SpaceX and obviously this whole uh, effort to colonize Mars seems to be the North Star, but not intended for the both of them to actually, you know, drive as hard as they're driving.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: And in the process they're solving a lot of issues. So talk about colonizing Mars and how what role does Aurelia and Rendezvous Robotics and all of these things fit in in that ambition?

Ariel Ekblaw: Because I have this childhood of science fiction. I love the idea of contributing to humanity's being able to explore the near neighborhood of our solar system. So I think it's a great thing to do. I think there's a lot of work to do in space in LEO for Earth first. So Aurelius first priority is looking at expanding self assembling real estate in orbit for Earth. It doesn't mean that we can't be part of the future for Mars. But what I would caution people to think about is thinking about a Mars civilization is a little different than a Mars outpost. So Mars has poison in the soil, Perchlorates. So unlike the Martian, you can't grow potatoes in the soil on Mars.

Sriram Viswanathan: Good Hollywood story.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah, good Hollywood story. But you're going to have to be vertically integrated, completely enclosed greenhouse, uh, you can't breathe the air on Mars. There's, you know, too much CO2, too thin of an atmosphere. And maybe the biggest challenge is that it's one third of Earth's gravity, around a third. And we're not sure that a woman can bring a baby to term in 1/3G. We're not sure what the embryonic development would look like. So you may have this interesting situation where there's a lot of interest in building a civilization on Mars, but some fundamental um, blockers to that. So it really becomes more like an outpost, like McMurdo in Antarctica. People are not being born and living out their full life cycle in McMurdo, but they are traveling to McMurdo to do great science, to do research and come home. There's a big difference there as to whether we're really going to push for a civilization on Mars, colonizing Mars, which means babies and life cycles are getting lived out there versus an outpost. And so I think the jury is kind of still out on what that future looks like. I do think it's of immense value to send humans to Mars, boots on the ground and do science. It's the nearest planet where we think there might be life other than ourselves. Um, probably more likely on something like Europa. Um, but when I was an intern at jpl, I worked on Sherlock, which is in classic NASA lingo, very conservative, looking for evidence of possible past habitability. So was it possible that life once existed on Mars? M. Um, and I think it's just a, you know, huge excitement and a really great area to explore.

Sriram Viswanathan: Well, you know, this whole idea of a million people on Mars, um, by 2035, 2040, I don't know, depending on, you know, uh, when.

Ariel Ekblaw: I think maybe we'll have our first expeditionary boots on Mars, like a crew of six or something in 2000-30s late. Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: Right.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah. Ah, yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: So, you know, Elon has a way of talking about this in Hyperbolic terms,

Ariel Ekblaw: so, which is very aspirational and it motivates a lot of people which I think is a wonderful thing. And meanwhile he's also very pragmatic. He's doing Starlink in the meantime. You know, now he's going to be competing for um, and has won human uh, landing system to go to the moon. So I don't um, I don't have a problem with the aspirations viewpoint. I do think that there's like a, there's a nuance there about what is it that we're really chasing millions of people on Mars or an outpost on Mars. I'm a little bit biased. I like microgravity habitats because you can spin them. And so why anchor human civilization to another gravity well like Mars that's not the right gravity well for our biology when you could put those humans in space and spin the habitat, massive habitat at the right gravity for our bodies. So I think the answer is probably a hybrid approach in the future.

Sriram Viswanathan: This is a very different vision um, of uh, uh, exploration. Um, the vision that you're painting is very different than the current true trajectories that uh, SpaceX just as a side, um, I didn't realize that Blue Origin got started before SpaceX.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: Um, and it took them 20 years almost to have the first Glenn or Shepherd uh, rocket to go up. New Glenn uh, to go up. Why do you think that is? Is it just because they didn't invest enough? What was the reason do you think?

Ariel Ekblaw: My understanding is the early years of Blue they were a research org trying to do anything but rockets. Which is the right vision. It's actually a long termism vision. And this is something that I think Bezos gets right. He talks about, about millions of people living and working in space but not necessarily on Mars, um, in more of like a Jerry o' Neill Lagrange point which is very akin to what we're also interested in. Like have space stations in orbit where millions of people are living and working. The initial years of Blue. We're looking at rail guns.

Sriram Viswanathan: Um, in fact JWST is um, on one of the Lagrange points, isn't it?

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes, exactly. Which is such an elegant place.

Sriram Viswanathan: Talk about, for the benefit of our audience, talk about the Lagrange point.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah, so there's a few of them and they are between different celestial bodies. So it's between Earth, Moon and the sun. And there are these basically balance points in orbit where you can just stick something and it basically stays uh, so it's not constantly moving around and it's

Sriram Viswanathan: relative to the Earth and the sun. So you have a constant.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: Outpost of, uh, of lens, if you will, that doesn't move.

Ariel Ekblaw: It doesn't move. And so it would be a great place to cite a tens of thousands of people habitat. And the great irony of the 1975 NASA Summer Study, which is really iconic for my field of space architecture, is they thought we would be living in these space stations in Lagrange points in the 1990s. So aspirations in the space industry often kind of overshoot the near term, uh, pragmatic outcome. But I think for Blue, to answer your question, they were looking at all these other interesting technologies to get mass off of the Earth that's not chemical propulsion. And so I think some of their innovative tech will eventually come back around to be, to be really worthwhile. But that's my understanding of why their timeline is partially shifted.

Sriram Viswanathan: So, you know, in your, in your speech and interviews, you talk about democratizing space. Is there an irony there that the guys that are really driving it are, you know, billionaires that are driving it? And is that a contradiction? Yeah, yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw: I don't think about it in the same way that I think the media has depicted it, which is the media shows the, um, the barons of the space industry as proof that space is only for the elite or only for the wealthy. But if you look at those gentlemen's companies, what are they trying to do? They're trying to drop the cost of space, space so that more people can go. And they have these visions of millions of people going. So their entire DNA of their organizations are focused on bringing down the costs and bringing up the engineering capacity to democratize access to space. Um, the fact that the media paints the early flights as very exclusionary, I think is forgetting the history of how, um, technology and transportation develops. Air travel was really luxury when you first started out in the 1940s. You'd get dressed up to fly. It was, um, a thing for like a smaller segment of the population. But then the costs come down, the reliability goes up, and it is fundamentally democratized. I think we're at an inflection point where with reusable rockets, we're about to get there in the next 10 years. I've been basically telling people if you have kids or if you have nieces or nephews in your life, those younger people like Gen Z, Gen Alpha, could very well commute to space for work. I don't think that they will live in space because we talked about this. Earth is the best home we've ever had. So stop getting people to think about, oh, well, I live my life in space. Probably not, but you might commute, and maybe not nine to five, but you might commute two weeks on and two weeks off. Like an oil rig job or like going to Svalbard. And hopefully much more beautiful and enjoyable than an oil rig job. But there are some learnings in that too. It's easy to inadvertently explore, exploit workers in extreme environments. And you can imagine you get a job on the moon and you go and you don't like the job. Oh boy, they're paying for your air. You can't walk off the job and go home. And they are your ride home. M. So it is worth thinking about. I think you hit on something actually very trenchant, which is let's make sure it's not like an oil rig job. Let's make sure it's safe.

Sriram Viswanathan: Which, which leads me to exactly the question that I want to ask you, which is if you were to, and you made the analogy to the, uh, airline industry and before it became truly democratized, you had governance, you had.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes, regulation.

Sriram Viswanathan: You had regulation, you had faa and in large part you could argue that most of the world's different, uh, sovereign airline administration sort of takes a page off of FAA and it's pretty universal. Uh, does that concern you that we're making all of these decision. These are fundamental strategic decisions that we're making about where to explore, you know, precedents, precedent. And there's no administration. There's no sort of a global structure for governance. Does that bother you?

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes, definitely does bother me. Um, I think the FAA would tell you, hey, we've raised our hands. The FAA really wants to regulate space as well. There's a little bit of infighting going on in Washington right now for witness rich u S Based agency. Because like you said, sometimes the prolificness and the leadership of a u S. Based agency comes to dominate other practices around the world. There's a big competition right now in the U. S. Government between commerce, um, faa, um, NASA, uh, FCC for who and Noah, you know, for who regulates different aspects of the space industry. Right. One thing that does exist, exist on the international scale is UNUSA, the Office of Space Affairs. And the. That's UN COPRA's Committee on peaceful uses of outer space keeps a space registry

Sriram Viswanathan: that's in a world when people are still thinking favorably about U.N. about the U.N. yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw: Which is very fair. And I think that may change. May change, Right. We're here in New York, but that may change. Um, but I think we have the precursor, um, tools set. We just need to see some thoughtful and not overly done but thoughtful application of regulatory ideas to this domain. Um, and I think now the light has really been turned on in Washington. A lot of people are thinking about this and you know, Space Force, uh, DoD, DiU, there's a lot of really thoughtful thinking coming out of that domain because they have a lot more active role in space than civilians, uh, may always understand. And they're doing, I think, really great best practices that may also filter down into, into the civilian space.

Sriram Viswanathan: Well, you know, if you were to just contrast that to the 60s or the early, uh, phases of the space exploration or space race as it were, you know, you had Soviet Union, uh, which had tremendous launch capacity, which evolved to esa.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: Uh, and then NASA till at least up until the shuttle program. And then with the war in Europe, there's no launch capacity in Europe and with NASA's funding, there's no launch capacity in NASA, uh, except in SpaceX.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: So effectively, and whether Blue Origin catches up or not, it's all academic. But the point is that private industry, which would hate regulation and governance and oversight.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: So the genie's out of the bottle. So effectively this is the model that everybody seems to be adopting, which is, you know, almost counterintuitive to, you know, uh, it's kind of like AI, where a lot of the, uh, LLM companies are raising the flag and saying, well, you know, you better regulate us because we're going to be creating a lot of great dangerous stuff. I don't see that happening in space, do you?

Ariel Ekblaw: I think it might be harder to put the genie back in the bottle in the AI domain because it's so proliferated in the space domain there are choke holds, which is things like electromagnetic spectrum, which determine whether you can even talk to your satellite or not. The FCC has gone through waves, depending on the administration of whether they're harder on SpaceX or easier. So there are some real choke points in regulation in the US that can be applied to space companies if things go out of whack. There's also fundamental liability. Um, international law. In the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which we did sign us, didn't sign a lot of space treaties, but we, we signed that one that basically says the nation state from which a launch happens or a product is launched is ultimately responsible for, um, liability of that object. So there's a precedent to be setting for how the US and China, for example, might negotiate liability on the moon. Still, a lot of open questions in international law for that. But I think it might be easier because there are some of these areas where US government agencies can really put the brakes on if they wanted to. And most people don't want them to, maybe more thoughtfully than like truly unregulated. But there are some ways to put brakes on the space industry because there's higher barriers to entry than there are for AI.

Sriram Viswanathan: Mhm. Yeah. And also in, um, you know, maybe this comparison is probably not appropriate, but at least in AI, you have China as a competing force. That makes m. You have it in space too. But perhaps, you know, China still doesn't have the same kind of a launch capacity as US has, or, you know, there's no starlink kind of a, you know, capability or reusable rockets and all of that. So they, they're at a different trajectory, they're in a different slope, in different slope than AI.

Ariel Ekblaw: We get told in the space industry all the time that we essentially have a cold war with China. Um, Elon once gave an interview when he was asked, who are you most worried about in terms of your competition? Is it Rocket lab? Is it somebody else? He's like, nope, it's Long March, which is the Chinese capability. And this was several years ago. Um, so I do think that although it doesn't get talked about in the press as much as the AI China space race, or, uh, AI race, I think that there is a space race with China and they are pushing really hard to get back to the moon before us, which I think is why you've seen the Trump administration support Jared Isaacman.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yes.

Ariel Ekblaw: And really, really, really push for a moon base soon. So interesting in that China is driving competition in both domains and some people have likened this to the Soviet Union, that maybe one of the other subterranean reasons that the space industry is taking off again is, oh, look, we actually do have a government and military also funded underneath, um, space race with a peer adversary.

Sriram Viswanathan: M. In fact, you know, France, China, so, you know, the old Soviet Union or Russia and the US have always been the, uh, sort of the pioneers in space. But now in the global south, you're starting to see India make some noises as well. And as you and I were just talking about with Chandrayaan, they launched, uh, uh, uh, a satellite to the moon to land at a cost that was less than the cost of making the movie Gravity, which is just stunning. Uh, we're actually an investor in a company called, uh, Agnico Cool, which is kind of a. Think of it as a cheaper, uh, version of SpaceX and we talked about SpaceX reducing it to $200 per kilogram. They are trying to beat that with reusable uh, rockets and all of that. So um, Aurelia is going to have a role to play, at least your nonprofit portion of it. You have the fund, you have the Rendezvous rockets. So do you envision you playing a role in helping shape policy and if so, how? What would be your priority in that aspect?

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah, it's great that you asked that. Aurelia has three pillars of what we do and it's great that you asked about policy because it's our third one. So we do R D, uh, for life in space, for space habitats technology like Rendezvous Robotics that we spun out. We do education and outreach so really focused on zero gravity flights bringing more people into the space industry through that gateway. And it really sublime experience. We bring fellowships and projects and researchers and students. And then the third is our attempt at being thoughtful about policy. So we're new in this arena, but what we want to do is be good stewards of the space commons in this framing of the anthropocosmos. M so if you think of the Anthropocene as this era where humans came to dominate life on Earth, it's this particular era of planetary history, geologic history and human history. The anthropocosmos is our framing to say we're about to become very dominant in our near neighborhood of our solar system going out into the cosmos and what opportunities but also responsibilities come with that and how can we be good stewards into that future? So we are absolutely thinking about some of these policy questions.

Sriram Viswanathan: That's great, that's great. Well, listen, I can keep going on. This is such a fascinating topic and you have such a brilliant way of explaining, explaining things. And um, I don't think that you're really working, you're just having fun.

Ariel Ekblaw: I'm really delighted by what I do.

Sriram Viswanathan: Delighted by what you do and it shows. Um, so if I can uh, as we try to wrap this, um, let's just do a little future, uh, outlook. Ah, question. What aspect of space do you think is overhyped and what is underhyped?

Ariel Ekblaw: The underhyped aspect is easy. I think it's bio in space. People decided that, oh, because there wasn't an immediate commercial success from the ISS bio, therefore that must not be a good domain. And I think as we talked about earlier, there's so much potential for life saving treatment developed in space and brought back down to Earth. Um, for overhyped, I Think civilizations on Mars or even just in general civilizations on planetary bodies. And we kind of have this orthodoxy as humans. We like to stand on things and we just want it to be a rock. And I, I do understand that, but I think that it's overhyped. When we could be thinking about the freedom of Jerry o' Neill style space stations orbiting at Lagrange points or else points.

Sriram Viswanathan: How confident are you that we can get to a neutral state on the radiation effects of space? I mean if, you know, I'm sure. Scott Kelly the twin study that they did was pretty profound. I mean I read that. And uh, the two of them are twin brothers. One of them is. Or both of them are astronauts.

Ariel Ekblaw: Crazy. NASA has twin astronauts.

Sriram Viswanathan: Twin astronauts and they went up and came back and they have profound implications of that. So radiation. How confident are you that this is something that we can nail?

Ariel Ekblaw: Oh, it's a great question. I am optimistic. There's a lot of work yet to be done. So it is an unsolved problem. It's not something where I could say, oh, you know, in five years we're just going to wrap up the research that we've started. I think we can probably handle it for trips to the moon and back. For a trip to Mars or a long duration, longer stay on Mars, we will need to tunnel or hide. We'll need to protect ourselves to be able to, to really address radiation like that. Unless we come up with some new material science. Um, some MIT researchers are looking at carbon boron nanotubes. Interesting opportunity to block some ionizing radiation. Or NASA has these proposals like water walls where you put your gray water. Your recycled. Yeah. Around the inside of your habitat. Turns out it's m. More efficient in some ways than lead.

Sriram Viswanathan: Water is a great.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: It's a great producer of radiation.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yeah. Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: Would also be, you know, great coolant.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes, could also be a coolant. Yeah. So there are some proposals out there, but we have a lot of work to do still for radiation.

Sriram Viswanathan: So um, you know, I think it was Elon, I was watching one of his interviews where he said he would be uh, more than delighted to go on a one way trip.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes. To die on Mars.

Sriram Viswanathan: And die on Mars. So would you ever want to go?

Ariel Ekblaw: I would absolutely want to go. In my lifetime, if there was an opportunity to go to Mars, I would absolutely jump at it. I would prefer for it to be architected as a mission where there's at least a hope of return. But I think in the same way that my ancestors emigrated to America which was a country that was settled by people who it was a one way trip for them.

Sriram Viswanathan: It was a one way trip.

Ariel Ekblaw: Right. For many of the early pioneers and pilgrims, it was a one way trip. I think there's a situation under which I would consider even that. Um, but I would prefer for it to be architected as a return trip.

Sriram Viswanathan: But in the meantime, you're probably going to be doing a lot of these. Vomit.

Ariel Ekblaw: Yes.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah. Yeah. And, um, the, uh, last question, you know, what would you say to yourself, a younger self, uh, you know, as a 10 year old, if you were to look back and tell that 10 year old, what would you say?

Ariel Ekblaw: I think the original 10 year old self wanted to be a librarian.

Sriram Viswanathan: Ah.

Ariel Ekblaw: So I would say your life is going to be very differently different. I think when I was 10, I had not yet read sci fi because a lot of the 1970s sci fi is a little bit inappropriate. Um, but then when I became a teenager, I was allowed to get into this amazing storytelling and sci fi world. So I think my mental conception of my life probably changed a lot from when I was 10 to even when I was 15.

Sriram Viswanathan: Um, Ariel, this has been such a fascinating conversation. I just absolutely enjoyed every aspect of it. I can't wait to understand more about, at some of the companies that you're involved in and also look at, uh, the nonprofit side of things. Most importantly, I want to sign up for the Zero Gravity mission.

Ariel Ekblaw: Amazing. Let's make it happen.

Sriram Viswanathan: Let's make it happen.

Ariel Ekblaw: Thank you so much for having me.

Sriram Viswanathan: Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Sriram Viswanathan: The space headlines today are, uh, largely about Mars and billionaires. But the most interesting story in space right now isn't where the headlines are. The actual economic activity is in the low Earth orbit, or leo. And it's happening because resource constraints on Earth have continued to increase. Power, water permitting, grid queues, regulation, around, um, 7 gigawatts of planned US AI data center capacity has already been canceled or delayed for those reasons. That's part of what makes orbital infrastructure suddenly look like a real and viable option. The technical bottlenecks have shifted too. Launch is largely getting solved. The hard problems are now what happens after launch. Assembly, power management, radiation, debris governance and control. One of Ariel's key points is that the most consequential thing space might do this decade isn't about getting humans off the planet. It may be about taking heavy industry, compute, infrastructure and energy production off the planet so that the Earth becomes easier for humans to live on without all the associated detrimental effects.

Sriram Viswanathan: Thank you for tuning in to the Tech Surge Podcast from Celesta Capital. If you enjoyed this episode, feel free

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Sriram Viswanathan: Bye for now.