Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast The Future of Space Stations with Ariel Ekblaw About this episode Can we put the data centers in space? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly map out the future of human habitation, research, and industry in low Earth orbit with Ariel Ekblaw, founder and CEO of the Aurelia Institute.
Transcript 11,910 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Gary.
0:00 Gary O'Reilly? Yes.
0:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We just learned that the future in space does not include the ISS. It's going down.
0:06 Gary O'Reilly? Space drama.
0:07 Chuck Nice? Yeah, hopefully they take the astronauts out first, though.
0:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? OK, we'll send Chuck's note along.
0:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Coming up, what our future in space will probably look like because we got the expert on StarTalk.
0:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
0:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? StarTalk begins right now.
0:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk special edition, which means I got Gary O'Reilly right next to me, Gary.
0:40 Gary O'Reilly? Hey, Neil.
0:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And Chuck Nice.
0:41 Chuck Nice? What's up, Neil?
0:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, so Gary, I don't know how you came up with this subject. You and Lane over in LA.
0:47 Gary O'Reilly? All right, yeah, we had a little help from Lindsay Walker.
0:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And Lindsay Walker.
0:51 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, so.
0:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? My co-author, Lindsay Walker.
0:53 Gary O'Reilly? And credit to both Lindsay and Lane. All right, let's get into this.
0:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
0:57 Gary O'Reilly? Consider this, the ISS is to be decommissioned.
1:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? International Space Station, for those who have never listened to the show ever.
1:04 Chuck Nice? At all.
1:06 Gary O'Reilly? That's due 2030, 2031. So now you start to extend your thought process. So what will replace it? What will Earth's orbital space look like? What new technologies are going to emerge? Will Earth's orbit become an annex for our off-worlding our industries?
1:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I love that phrase, off-worlding.
1:28 Gary O'Reilly? Mm-hmm.
1:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That just sounds so.
1:31 Chuck Nice? It sounds so futuristic and spacey.
1:34 Gary O'Reilly? I mean, there's.
1:35 Chuck Nice? I have to get off-world.
1:38 Chuck Nice? Right now, I'm telling you, I'm a wanted man. I have to get off-world.
1:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Off-world.
1:42 Gary O'Reilly? So I mean, that's, that's going to be prefixed with a big old dollar sign.
1:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
1:46 Gary O'Reilly? Once you start to get into those areas. There's a lot to unpack, so let's bring on our guest, shall we?
1:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, I mean, we got a guest here. I, you know, it'll take me half the show to read the credentials here.
1:56 Gary O'Reilly? Then don't read them all.
1:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, I'm going to read them all.
1:59 Gary O'Reilly? Oh, OK.
2:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We have Ariel Ekblaw. Do I pronounce your name correctly?
2:03 Speaker 03 You did, sir.
2:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ariel, welcome back to StarTalk.
2:06 Speaker 03 Thank you.
2:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You were last on during COVID.
2:09 Speaker 03 Yes.
2:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I have no memory of anything that happened during COVID. And I didn't even have COVID.
2:13 Speaker 03 Don't we all?
2:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's not my excuse.
2:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you are founder and CEO. I love anybody who's that of anything. And CEO. Founder and CEO of the Aurelia Institute, whose mission is to bring humanity's space exploration future to life.
2:29 Speaker 03 I'm working on it.
2:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, making the future now. Now. Yes, okay. Founder and director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative. Hmm, look at that. Man. That's serious. Been busy. Some serious stuff.
2:46 Speaker 03 Hashtag nerd would also suffice.
2:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, that's true. Hashtag nerd. Right. Yeah, like geek nerd squared. NASA Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium on the executive committee of that. Okay. And you've actually worked on space hardware that's on the surface of Mars right now. Oh, wow. So your parents are really disappointed.
3:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just like, I don't know what happened.
3:14 Speaker 03 I never did learn to fly. They are.
3:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, God.
3:16 Speaker 03 Oh, the underachiever.
3:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ariel, get out. Parents are Air Force pilots, both of them.
3:21 Speaker 03 Yes, my parents are both pilots.
3:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're such a disappointment.
3:24 Speaker 03 What's left, though? Double pilot parents? You gotta go to space.
3:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's right. Oh. That's so true. Okay. Mom, Dad, Stanley atmosphere. I don't care.
3:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what piece of hardware is on Mars that you touched?
3:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, I got to work on Sherlock on the Perseverance Rover Mars 2020, which is looking for, in NASA's classic terminology, can't say looking for life, looking for signs of past habitability on the Martian surface.
3:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Looking for life. Look at that.
3:51 Speaker 03 Looking for life.
3:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Looking for life. That's the current rover. It's still an active rover. It is an active rover. Don't tell me it's got a deer stalker hat and a magnifying glass. Running around in Martian slums. Very Sherlock Holmesy. Yeah. No, I'm delighted to learn all of this. Now, the bit that you worked on, that was at JPL, I guess, when they assembled it. So you didn't like sneeze on it before they launched it?
4:11 Speaker 03 Not to my knowledge, but thank God.
4:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And now there is life on Mars.
4:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, wait a minute. This aerial snot, a marmot that comes to life.
4:20 Speaker 03 Snuck past that planetary protection protocol.
4:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
4:23 Chuck Nice? Yeah, it's the Andromeda strain, it's the aerial strain.
4:27 Speaker 03 Oh, God, the horror. They bake those things out there. They gotta really heat them up before they send them. So I'm pretty sure that my little fingerprint gets baked off of that aluminum.
4:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Nice. Or the booger that you put on it when you were...
4:37 Speaker 03 What that do?
4:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Stop. Stop. Okay, let me get, let me start off here. So, the International Space Station. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when it was debated, when we wanted to make sure, because at the end of the Cold War, all these Russian aerospace scientists, we didn't want them going to our enemy.
4:56 Chuck Nice? Right.
4:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the original space station, which was called Space Station Freedom, we retooled that to bring in the Russian astronauts. And only then did it become the International Space Station, bringing in the Japanese and Europe and the like. So, when was that, early 90s? So that was 35 years ago. And no one would come near any piece of technology that's 35 years old.
5:23 Speaker 03 Today, oh, for sure.
5:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If I say, oh, look at this shoulder-mounted cellphone, or whatever. So we have a space station that is way older than anything you would deign to use.
5:35 Speaker 03 Today.
5:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Here on Earth. So, just put this in context now. Did they not build in its obsolescence? Future-proof.
5:43 Speaker 03 Future-proof, yeah.
5:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or future-proof. But either we know it's gonna be, we're gonna drop it out of the sky, or we have swappable paddles everywhere. But now the future's become exponential. So the... So tell me. Yeah.
5:54 Speaker 03 Yeah, so how do you prepare? I think that's a great point. Yeah, it's basically debated, thought about in the 80s, debated and then built in the 90s, flown in the early 2000s. So it's like a home that desperately needs a reno. It's really old. And what we're looking at now is what's the next opportunity to build modern technology into space architecture fundamentally for this next wave of commercial space stations that are gonna replace the International Space Station when it does get decommissioned 2030, 2031.
6:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is decommission code for drop it out of orbit?
6:23 Speaker 03 Fiery death.
6:25 Chuck Nice? Fiery death.
6:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're gonna decommission you. This is a small object.
6:28 Speaker 03 Yes.
6:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is sizable.
6:30 Speaker 03 Yes, and it's no small feat for NASA to be able to do that well. I think there's a lot of orbital dynamics planning and re-entry drag engineering.
6:38 Chuck Nice? What's the difference between something that large and things that are de-orbiting all the time?
6:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, whether they burn up completely on re-entry, whether they fully incinerate, or whether, for the case of the ISS, probably parts of it will end up being intentionally plopped in the ocean or somewhere if it's not fully burning up on re-entry.
6:56 Chuck Nice? Unless you're China, in which case you don't care where you throw your garbage. China, throwing their garbage all over the world.
7:03 Speaker 03 This is a very trenchant example because the Chinese did get in some trouble for Tiangong, one of their earliest space stations, for not de-orbiting it properly. So there's a lot of eyes on NASA. I believe in NASA fully at the ability to do this, but there's a lot of eyes on NASA to make sure they do it well, do it safely.
7:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To do it safely and well means you drop it into the great toilet bowl of space, which is the Pacific Ocean.
7:26 Speaker 03 Yes.
7:26 Chuck Nice? Right.
7:27 Speaker 03 And not on land.
7:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The Pacific Ocean is one-third of all longitude on Earth. If you can't plunk a satellite into that, you got problems.
7:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, just don't hit Point Nemo, right? Because on Point Nemo, the crazy thing, Point Nemo is the most remote place on Earth.
7:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is that where Finding Nemo went?
7:42 Speaker 03 If only, then we'd know where he was. Yeah.
7:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That was good.
7:46 Speaker 03 I'm just learning from the best.
7:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That was so good. Okay, so what is Point Nemo?
7:52 Speaker 03 Point Nemo is the most remote place on Earth, so if you're in Point Nemo, you're farther away from any other human, any other landmass, except when the International Space Station flies over, then you're only 250 miles away from a human. So when, you know, when it goes over Point Nemo, you're closer to space humans than you are to Earth humans.
8:09 Chuck Nice? Wow, and doesn't that sound like heaven, to be close to the space humans than you are to Earth humans?
8:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you're like a hermit, yeah.
8:17 Gary O'Reilly? Is there any way you can deassemble the ISS before you bring it back?
8:22 Speaker 03 Yes, I suspect that there will be part of the CONOPS, Concept of Operations, is they're going to pluck some of the different modules apart, rather than just trying to have the entire kind of unwieldy structure with all those solar panels.
8:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But why would you do that? Is it because you can reuse it, something from 35 years ago? Let the damn thing burn up.
8:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, so this is the crux of NASA's plan that just got re-announced with Ignition. So we have Jared Isaacson, new NASA Administrator, exciting times. They are going to double down on this idea that the new commercial space stations who are going to replace the International Space Station, first, they attach to the existing ISS, they build up their modules, and then it's like the phoenix rising from the ashes of the ISS. The remainder of the ISS that's not going to be kind of consumed and built into the future, the remainder of the ISS will be de-orbited.
9:11 Chuck Nice? I'm gonna say, that's a pretty damn good plan.
9:14 Speaker 03 It's a cool plan.
9:15 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
9:16 Gary O'Reilly? But that means sending astronauts out, and the risk of that, and you're putting people in jeopardy.
9:22 Chuck Nice? Space construction, man!
9:24 Gary O'Reilly? What could go wrong?
9:25 Chuck Nice? That is awesome! Come on! We all know that when you have space construction, okay, that a jump scare is coming.
9:32 Speaker 03 This is what I'm really passionate about. How do we start to build things way bigger than the International Space Station, where each module could only be as big as your biggest rocket? They then put a bunch of them together, but what if you could build a room?
9:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, just unpack that. So the biggest module was what could fit in the payload bay of the shuttle. So there's no piece up there that's bigger, unless you're gonna fold it. But so, all those cylindrical pieces, they, like, within...
10:01 Speaker 03 Oh, crazy tolerances.
10:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Crazy tolerance.
10:04 Chuck Nice? Right.
10:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because you max that out.
10:06 Chuck Nice? Right.
10:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so the shuttle and the space station complete each other.
10:09 Gary O'Reilly? Oh, my God. Are we talking flat pack?
10:12 Speaker 03 We are talking flat, we're talking IKEA.
10:15 Gary O'Reilly? NASA are gonna go to IKEA, you took the thought out of my mind. Because we told you kilos equal dollars, in terms of payload.
10:22 Chuck Nice? Okay, go ahead.
10:24 Gary O'Reilly? No, no, so this is where you're taking it? Where do you get your cues for design? Now we've, we know we're gonna flat pack everything, where do we get our cues from design? Is it the 35-year-old tech, or are we thinking something, or even further back than that?
10:36 Speaker 03 In some sense, even further back. So it's like this vision from science fiction of how do you have massive structures that are way bigger than your biggest rocket payload fairing? And there's this idea from Buckminster Fuller, so even well before the International Space Station was designed, of buckyballs, geodesic domes. Why do we love spheres in space? Because for a given surface area, you're optimizing for all that volume, most efficient shape.
11:01 Gary O'Reilly? Okay, I can't resist saying this, you're inventing spaceballs.
11:05 Gary O'Reilly? Sorry. You could not keep that in my mind.
11:09 Speaker 03 Slowly but surely.
11:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Spaceballs.
11:12 Chuck Nice? When exactly does Dark Helmet enter the equation?
11:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Was that his name, Dark Helmet?
11:17 Chuck Nice? Yes.
11:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or was it Darth Vader?
11:18 Chuck Nice? Not Darth Vader.
11:19 Speaker 03 Not Dark Helmet. Self-assembling spaceballs, yes.
11:21 Chuck Nice? Very nice.
11:22 Speaker 03 That's the idea.
11:22 Chuck Nice? So why, either why not, or in addition to, would you not use printing? Since we are now able to print extremely strong, very light metals.
11:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So 3D printing?
11:37 Chuck Nice? Yes, 3D printing.
11:38 Speaker 03 Yes. I think the answer is yes and.
11:40 Chuck Nice? Okay.
11:41 Speaker 03 So we definitely want innovative structures in space. We want self-assembling modular things.
11:45 Chuck Nice? Gotcha.
11:46 Speaker 03 The reason we want modularity that's not just 3D printed, because when it's 3D printed, it's solid.
11:50 Chuck Nice? It's a done deal.
11:51 Speaker 03 If you get damage on one of my modular, flat-packed panels that have since popped out of their can.
11:57 Chuck Nice? I got you.
11:58 Speaker 03 Self-assembled, you can remove a tile popping you off. Or if you had a window tomorrow.
12:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's Legos.
12:02 Chuck Nice? It's Lego's.
12:04 Speaker 03 It's space Legos with magnets.
12:06 Gary O'Reilly? Legos. If you're making a so.
12:07 Chuck Nice? With magnets.
12:08 Speaker 03 Yes.
12:08 Chuck Nice? Nice.
12:09 Gary O'Reilly? Okay, we'll get on to magnets, but that's.
12:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And since you're in zero G, you will never step on a stray Lego piece and hurt your feet.
12:17 Chuck Nice? You'll never hear an astronaut in the middle, well, it's always the middle of the night go.
12:25 Chuck Nice? Look, then leave your Lego down.
12:29 Gary O'Reilly? So if you're making the spherical construction, that's tessellation of shapes. So that becomes biomimicry?
12:36 Speaker 03 It does. My PhD at MIT was really inspired by ideas in biology of how nature self-assembles.
12:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In what department was that?
12:44 Speaker 03 I was in between AeroAstro, course 16, and the MIT Media Lab, which is very creative architecture.
12:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I know. Yeah, we've had people from there here before. So, right, so you, they couldn't fit you anywhere, so you had to straddle.
12:56 Chuck Nice? Wow.
12:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, all right, all right.
12:58 Gary O'Reilly? Okay, the irony is, you wouldn't trust a 35-year-old technology.
13:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, I wouldn't.
13:01 Gary O'Reilly? But we've gone to Mother Nature for cues.
13:04 Speaker 03 Yes.
13:04 Gary O'Reilly? To design the future.
13:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Tell me some of your, your nature cues.
13:06 Chuck Nice? Ah, yeah, that's cool.
13:08 Speaker 03 Self-assembly, like how proteins fold within the body or fold up into DNA.
13:13 Chuck Nice? Very cool.
13:13 Speaker 03 Other examples of small units, like swarms of termites and ants.
13:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
13:19 Speaker 03 They can take their tiny little bodies and bridge a gap that is bigger than.
13:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I've seen that.
13:24 Chuck Nice? They self-attach to each other.
13:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It scares the hell out of me.
13:27 Chuck Nice? They create structures.
13:28 Speaker 03 If they had a bigger brain, we would be nervous.
13:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, they would be.
13:31 Chuck Nice? However, if they had a bigger brain, you'd never be on the bottom of those structures when it comes to floods. That's how they survive floods.
13:36 Speaker 03 Yes, yeah.
13:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
13:37 Speaker 03 Because they just.
13:38 Chuck Nice? They climb on top of each other, create a raft, and then the ones on the bottom, they're just like, I'm so sorry. Sorry, Adam. Oh, God. Adam gave himself for us all, guys.
13:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just a quick brain fact, recently learned by me. We grew up hearing that, of course, we don't have the biggest brains. But the biggest brains relative to our body weight.
14:01 Chuck Nice? Okay.
14:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You have to perform some math magic to get us back at the top of that list. Otherwise, we're fourth, right? Behind whales, dolphins, and elephants.
14:09 Speaker 03 Gotta normalize.
14:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Exactly. However, that's not even true. We're only fourth, we're only the top of the brain to body weight ratio among mammals.
14:19 Speaker 03 Ah.
14:20 Chuck Nice? Really?
14:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you bring in mid-sized birds, because birds are very light.
14:24 Chuck Nice? Yes, they are.
14:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. You bring in mid-sized birds, we are behind birds.
14:27 Speaker 03 Wow.
14:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you know who beats everybody out?
14:31 Chuck Nice? Who?
14:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Some species of ant. And you know they got big heads.
14:36 Chuck Nice? Yes, they have giant heads.
14:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You've seen the heads of some ants. So I'm just saying.
14:38 Speaker 03 He's just fact-checking us here, talking about these ants.
14:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I'm just saying, you got ants doing everything you're describing. They're probably doing calculus in their head.
14:45 Chuck Nice? That wouldn't be funny.
14:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
14:46 Chuck Nice? Yeah, stupid humans still trying to figure out calculus. Jesus Christ, look at them building above-ground housing. Dumb asses.
14:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Above-ground housing.
14:56 Speaker 03 That's right, take them to Mars, they're gonna help us do that, all that below-ground housing.
15:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Have them do all the construction.
15:01 Chuck Nice? There you go.
15:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I've always wondered why Hollywood aliens tend to have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, ears, head, shoulders, neck, arms, legs, fingers, toes. Maybe it's because an actor is donning a costume. That's one of the reasons why I wrote Take Me to Your Leader. It's to explore all that is possible in this universe beyond what has yet to be imagined by Hollywood. So that for your first alien encounter, you'll be prepared. You'll have some anticipation of what they could look like, what kind of ship they arrived in, what you should or should not say, or should or should not presume. I narrated the audiobook. The print version is available as well.
15:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You better get the book now before you have that first alien encounter, because afterwards, it'll be too late.
16:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ariel.
16:13 Speaker 03 Yes.
16:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I want an answer to this.
16:15 Speaker 03 Okay.
16:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Why are you and NASA ignoring what every sci-fi writer knows?
16:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You rotate your space station.
16:23 Speaker 03 You do.
16:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that no one has to complain about bone loss and zero G and muscle loss and I rotate something so you get artificial gravity. And your ear problems.
16:36 Speaker 03 I got a five-step plan.
16:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You do?
16:38 Speaker 03 This is phase zero. Yes.
16:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, well, do tell.
16:41 Speaker 03 So get them self-assembling first. So pack them flat in a rocket, get that IKEA furniture. Fine. Pop them out like a little Pez dispenser. The magnets help the tiles self-assemble. The first structure is a sphere because we want a microgravity lab because we want to do biotech research that we tend to do.
16:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? For the companies that are doing research.
16:59 Speaker 03 And for scientists like where I come from, from MIT, all of that. But then the future absolutely is to try to tessellate structures and then spin them. And so at Aurelia Institute, our nonprofit where we do all of this space architecture research, we've just released a paper on artificial gravity and our particular take on it.
17:17 Gary O'Reilly? All right, so you said about magnetism, self-assembly. But there's a lot of magnetism around in space and other environmental issues. So you've got that to do with.
17:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What do you mean? What are you talking about?
17:28 Gary O'Reilly? What kind of space junk?
17:29 Speaker 03 Earth's magnetic field.
17:31 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah.
17:31 Speaker 03 Got to consider that when we have magnets. Yeah, space junk.
17:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's not all that strong.
17:35 Gary O'Reilly? And then you've got to, you've got to make sure you've got a hundred percent seal.
17:38 Speaker 03 Yes.
17:38 Gary O'Reilly? On every facet of every tile.
17:41 Speaker 03 This was the hardest question.
17:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, that makes sense.
17:44 Speaker 03 Yes. And so the trade off to modular self-assembly is you get all these seams. So what do we do with the seams? The magnets are what bring the exoskeleton together. So click, click, click in this big sphere. And then between every.
17:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you're using magnets in lieu of bolts and other fastening devices?
18:01 Speaker 03 In addition. So the magnets pull the tiles together while they're still separated. So instead of using propulsion or a consumable like air person.
18:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're exploiting a force of nature to do this, a free force of nature.
18:13 Speaker 03 Exactly. Because you couldn't do it on Earth. And this is the elegance of self-assembly in space.
18:18 Gary O'Reilly? You don't have the work force issue.
18:19 Speaker 03 There's no friction.
18:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I hadn't put all this together the way you clearly have. If you have magnetic forces to otherwise move pieces in space.
18:30 Speaker 03 Yes.
18:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Requires some act of propulsion.
18:32 Speaker 03 Right.
18:33 Chuck Nice? Right.
18:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And if there's already a built in force, then you've got it.
18:35 Chuck Nice? You don't need.
18:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Then the magnets come. Okay.
18:38 Chuck Nice? All right. So now step two.
18:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let me finish what I'm talking about.
18:41 Chuck Nice? Okay.
18:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So now you said, now, now we use the fancy word tessellate. Okay, fine. You tessellate. And what's another word she used?
18:48 Gary O'Reilly? I'm not telling you.
18:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're going to build a structure that you then will set rotating.
18:54 Speaker 03 Yes.
18:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What sets it into rotation?
18:56 Speaker 03 Ah, so the initial sphere that we're talking about, the bucky ball is not going to rotate.
19:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
19:01 Speaker 03 What we're working on for the artificial gravity is more of what we call like a xylem. You know, those tubes in plants that go up vertically along the length of the plant stem?
19:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
19:10 Speaker 03 We want to align a bunch of.
19:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That has a word, xylem?
19:12 Speaker 03 Xylem, xylem and floem. This is my like fourth grade memory from.
19:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
19:17 Speaker 03 Xylem and floem. So this is separate from the self-assembling bucky ball. But for the rotating artificial gravity station, the paper that we just put out is a bunch of cylinders. And you put the cylinders next to each other in a ring. And then you spin that ring. And what sets that moving is you're going to have a bunch of motors, basically. You're going to have a bunch of traditional mechanized systems to get that going.
19:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But something has to. Take on the angular momentum in the opposite direction. So what is that going to be?
19:44 Speaker 03 So we have a bunch of balanced ballast.
19:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
19:47 Speaker 03 And the structure that we're doing is we're trying to think about, if you think about like a typical ring, like 2001 Space Odyssey.
19:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Typical, typical.
19:54 Speaker 03 Typical sci-fi ring.
19:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In the movie.
19:56 Speaker 03 We're a sci-fi nurse, yeah, typical sci-fi ring.
19:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Basically a ribbon, some kind of, yeah, yeah. And that's the, and then the gravity is.
20:03 Speaker 03 Yes.
20:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is radial.
20:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's radial, right. The dirty little secret about that is if you're a human walking along that ring, you're going to feel different gravity if your head.
20:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? At your head, at your feet.
20:13 Speaker 03 At your feet.
20:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
20:14 Speaker 03 Which is a lot of weird cross coupling effects for your vestibular system.
20:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
20:17 Speaker 03 So we've changed that.
20:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Unless the ring is really huge.
20:20 Speaker 03 Yes.
20:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And then the difference will be small.
20:22 Speaker 03 Then we're talking like, yeah, 100 kilometers. If you could pull off a ring that big, very small. And then you won't feel sick, right? Because you're spinning, but you're spinning so slowly at a huge diameter.
20:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
20:30 Speaker 03 How do we do artificial gravity in 10 years and not 100 years? That massive ring could be 100 years from now. What do we do in the next 10 years to make it more feasible? Instead of a ribbon of a ring, that was a great word. We have these cylinder pipes where the gravity level is consistent when you're occupying it. So you're not changing the gravity from, from foot to toe. So it's kind of like changing the geometry a little bit. Ultimately, it is a ring of cylinders that then gets spun.
20:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, so everywhere within a cylinder has the same force of gravity.
20:59 Speaker 03 That's the idea.
21:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
21:01 Speaker 03 Yes, at that same.
21:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But then what am I doing in that cylinder? I want to get to over here. Because that's where the gym is, and this is where, where, where the mess hall is.
21:08 Speaker 03 You, you do have to transit, and so we can't completely remove the cross coupling effects. If you're climbing towards the center, maybe the docking center of the ring, you're going to go from normal gravity.
21:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? One G to zero.
21:17 Speaker 03 Gradually floating, but you can do a ladder, you can do ergonomic techniques to help get the humans up there.
21:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So to be so worried about this variation from feet to head.
21:26 Speaker 03 Yes.
21:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When you apparently weren't worried when I was in no gravity at all. So what's a little gravity gradient between friends?
21:35 Speaker 03 Between friends, between moments, one moment to the next. It turns out it's tricky to basically have the human experience these gradient shifts. You really want to, when you go into zero gravity.
21:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How do you know that?
21:46 Speaker 03 We know that because of amazing studies done at MIT and elsewhere.
21:50 Chuck Nice? walking around right now who has zero balance at all is just falling all over the place. He thinks he's drunk.
21:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He's the one that she did the experiment on.
21:59 Speaker 03 It's carnival rides. We get the gravitron going and we play with people inside of it. Kind of true.
22:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I remember the gravitron. That's the rotating.
22:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
22:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thing. Yeah.
22:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's a centrifuge.
22:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Flying saucer. Yeah, yeah.
22:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, human sized centrifuge. So we learned some from that, from studies in that. And then there's also been a lot of science about when the astronauts first get to the International Space Station. Sometimes there's space sickness. They have to acclimate to the zero G environment. So we don't want you to be in a constant state of are you in real gravity or are you in zero G? You kind of want to pick one or the other and then give the humans as much time as possible to acclimate in those different regimes.
22:33 Chuck Nice? That's very cool.
22:34 Speaker 03 Yeah.
22:34 Chuck Nice? Yeah. And so with the gradient changes from head to foot in zero G, you wouldn't have that at all because there is no head to foot in zero G.
22:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's no up or down.
22:43 Speaker 03 There's no ceiling. There's no floor. Exactly right.
22:45 Chuck Nice? Okay, got you.
22:46 Speaker 03 The reason we're so excited about this first phase and then we're working towards our artificial gravity phase. But the first phase where you're staying floating, it's a big sphere. You're floating in a big sphere. We call it a geode because you have to think about how to subdivide a sphere on the inside. It's not a rectangular prism.
23:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
23:02 Speaker 03 So it's like little crystal chambers. It's kind of how we think about it. We want to do biotech. We want to do space infrastructure for the benefit of life on Earth first. And then we can kind of earn our right as a species to say, now let's go do artificial gravity. Spin our habitat on the way to Mars and go explore the rest of our souls.
23:20 Gary O'Reilly? Okay, so you touched on biotech. Can't we do basically almost everything you can do on the space station here on Earth? In terms, would you have the protein folding, Alpha Fold 3?
23:30 Speaker 03 Yep, Alpha Fold 3.
23:31 Gary O'Reilly? All those aspects that gave them 90 plus percent accuracy on prediction.
23:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alpha Fold 3 got the Nobel Prize, right?
23:38 Speaker 03 With David Baker and Demis Hassabis, their AI folding for proteins. Yeah, just won the Nobel Prize.
23:44 Gary O'Reilly? We had their head of IT.
23:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, protein folding.
23:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, okay.
23:47 Speaker 03 Yeah. Here's a great question. What can you do uniquely in the zero G environment that you can't do on Earth? I think there are.
23:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I only know one thing. Can I say it?
23:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
23:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can make perfect ball bearings.
23:58 Speaker 03 Yes.
23:59 Chuck Nice? Wow.
24:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because the forces. Right. Like back to her sphere. Back to the sphere, yeah. The sphere minimizes surface area and maximizes volume.
24:08 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Perfect ball bearing. That's all I know that you can make in space.
24:10 Speaker 03 And that hits on kind of the fundamental principles that you want to think about when you're saying, what can you only do in space? You have no convection. So hot air is not rising, cool air is not sinking.
24:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
24:21 Speaker 03 You have no sedimentation, nothing sinking down. And for a lot of biological biotech processes, that's huge to get rid of sedimentation.
24:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And by the way.
24:30 Speaker 03 Fully.
24:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They took a case of wine.
24:32 Speaker 03 They did.
24:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And put it up into the space station.
24:34 Speaker 03 Do you have a bottle? I feel like someone's got to give you a bottle of that.
24:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm not, I'm. I can neither confirm nor deny. No, the point was, so one case went up and one stayed on Earth.
24:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. And then they left it there for like. Did the twin experiment. There's the twin experiment.
24:47 Speaker 03 The NASA twin wine.
24:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It was exactly a case of identical wine. And they brought it back and they wanted me to comment officially on what effect zero G had on the wine. And I, I felt bad saying this, but if you're in zero G, the sediment doesn't know what to do. To do.
25:05 Chuck Nice? Oh.
25:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so that's the same thing as you go into your cellar, pull out a bottle, shake it every day and put it back in.
25:12 Speaker 03 Like it's gonna make it terrible.
25:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that's, that's, you're simulating the one in space. Like that. You just shake everything all the time. Dr. Tyson, here's the wine.
25:23 Chuck Nice? I cannot believe you bring this to me.
25:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Don't stop.
25:25 Chuck Nice? Your wine is absolute swill. You insult me.
25:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Keep going down the list.
25:30 Speaker 03 Yeah. So what can you do? So you don't have any convection.
25:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
25:32 Speaker 03 You don't have sedimentation.
25:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
25:33 Speaker 03 And then you have things that we typically think of as a difficulty, but in space can be a feature, not a bug. So use the vacuum or use radiation to do something.
25:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, wow.
25:44 Speaker 03 So on the first two, the convection and the lack of sedimentation, you can do tissue engineering in zero G in a way that you cannot do on Earth. And a wonderful example is this company, Lam Division, that's doing artificial retinas. Takes 200 layers of a really delicate little protein. And if you do it on Earth, you get little sagging effects. And with 200 layers, that amplifies the error.
26:07 Gary O'Reilly? Is this Lasix?
26:08 Speaker 03 It's not Lasix.
26:09 Gary O'Reilly? No, something else.
26:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's a different process. It's bacteria, the adoption.
26:12 Gary O'Reilly? No, that's why I asked, is it?
26:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
26:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, so it's a, it's making, Lasix is when they use light to make a change to your eye.
26:20 Gary O'Reilly? Right.
26:20 Speaker 03 This is growing a new retina in space. That is, because you're floating, you get this perfect little cell matrix. You get this perfect structure. They have figured out a way to stabilize it and bring it back down to Earth. So that you can actually have the surgery and the implantation on Earth.
26:37 Gary O'Reilly? Yo, that's crazy. We are now talking some serious low Earth orbit economy.
26:42 Speaker 03 Exactly. No Earth orbit manufacturing, ball bearings, tissue engineering, fiber optic cable.
26:47 Gary O'Reilly? This becomes pharmaceutical.
26:48 Speaker 03 Yes.
26:49 Gary O'Reilly? However, you know full well, the rarest of rare issues will get lost. Whereas the big.
26:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The rarest rare ailments within people.
26:58 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, so the big, the big, the big ticket number sort of issues, they'll be brought in.
27:04 Speaker 03 They'll be brought in, it's true. And you know, a great example of that is Merck's cancer drug, KEYTRUDA. It's a $30 billion cancer drug.
27:11 Gary O'Reilly? That's right.
27:11 Speaker 03 They took it to space to figure out, they basically did a parameter sweep, looking at the crystallization of the drug in space. And the amazing thing for KEYTRUDA is they figured out a way to get more precise, consistent size of the crystallization of the drug. And it took it from an IV drug to a shot.
27:29 Gary O'Reilly? Right.
27:29 Speaker 03 So huge for patient quality of life. You don't have to go into a hospital to get KEYTRUDA.
27:33 Gary O'Reilly? Or extrapolate that on Earth.
27:35 Speaker 03 Well, what they did, that's the magic of some of the tools now that we have on Earth. To your earlier point, that some of the things on Earth are getting so close to being good for space. For the KEYTRUDA, the cancer drug, they used space to do this parameter sweep of a bunch of data that would have been really hard to get on Earth. And then they figured out what it was.
27:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're exploring all the variables that affect an outcome.
27:56 Speaker 03 Exactly.
27:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so you'll know what not to do, how to repeat.
27:59 Speaker 03 Exactly, right. But then they were able to figure out how to mimic part of the parameters that they did get in space on the ground. So they don't have to make every dose of KEYTRUDA on the International Space Station.
28:10 Gary O'Reilly? No.
28:10 Speaker 03 So there's two examples, tissue engineering, it's physical, it's at a macro scale, even though we think of it as tiny, it's really macro scale for biology. That's good for those of us who want to build real estate and have a reason to expand our footprint in orbit.
28:23 Gary O'Reilly? Right.
28:23 Speaker 03 And then there's. Protein formulation and crystallization where maybe we get the data from space and then we help use that to inform earth-based processes.
28:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So in the future, there'll be a shelf of bio-pharmaceutical products.
28:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Made in space.
28:38 Speaker 03 Made in space. Spice lips.
28:39 Chuck Nice? Look at that. We went from made in Taiwan to made in space.
28:42 Speaker 03 There is a great company called Made in Space. They got acquired a couple of years ago. They're doing 3D printing, like what you were asking about.
28:48 Chuck Nice? Oh, very cool.
28:49 Speaker 03 And yeah, this is what we want to do with our first version of Tesseract, which is what we call the self-assembling ball. We want it to be an orbital biolab with shelves and shelves and shelves of experiments that are good for life on Earth. And my mission is to design it in a way that my graduate students at MIT could go and do their own experiments.
29:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Up there.
29:10 Speaker 03 As citizen scientists, well-trained, but not astronauts in their whole career. And that, I think, we're just at the cusp where the cost to get to space is getting low enough where that could be feasible in the next decade.
29:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I was gonna ask you that. A commonly quoted price.
29:22 Speaker 03 Yes.
29:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It was $10,000 a pound to orbit.
29:25 Speaker 03 Relatively low.
29:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And that's dropped in the era of SpaceX with reusable boosters and things.
29:31 Speaker 03 Yes.
29:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What is it now?
29:32 Speaker 03 It's about 1,500, forgive me, I'm gonna switch units on you. It's $1,500 a kilogram.
29:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is America.
29:37 Speaker 03 I know, I'm a scientist.
29:38 Chuck Nice? Wow. Wow, you said it like those two things are incongruent. Damn.
29:44 Speaker 03 I'm a very patriotic scientist.
29:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, just speak the metric slowly. Yes, go.
29:54 Speaker 03 About $1,500 a kilogram today.
29:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
29:56 Speaker 03 With Starship coming online, and these are not Elon's numbers, this is like independent analysis, it's expected to be $200 a kilogram.
30:03 Chuck Nice? Damn.
30:04 Speaker 03 Which is like FedEx.
30:05 Chuck Nice? That's right.
30:06 Speaker 03 If you can ship something around the world, cargo, humans are a little more fragile, we're a little more expensive. But if you can ship cargo around the world, you can ship it to space. And that is unlocking this incredible inflection point in the space industry.
30:18 Chuck Nice? That's very cool. Hey, you know what, can we, uh, we, cause I think we skipped a step here and there's a gap in the construction. Because Gary asked about the seams.
30:28 Speaker 03 Yes.
30:29 Chuck Nice? And that's very important because you can bring magnets together.
30:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sure.
30:32 Chuck Nice? But we're talking about the vacuum of space.
30:34 Speaker 03 We are.
30:35 Chuck Nice? So now, when you have these panels, what's gonna keep this? Yeah, cause you need, you need something to keep it.
30:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What holds your air pressure?
30:40 Chuck Nice? What holds it?
30:41 Speaker 03 Duct tape. Seal. Velcro.
30:45 Speaker 03 Made in space duct tape. Yeah, we prefer Velcro. Okay. No, we do clamps. So between all of the seams of this tessellated bucky ball that's made out of hexagons and pentagons, those are the tiles that come together with the magnets.
30:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just a quick second, isn't that a soccer ball?
31:02 Gary O'Reilly? You read my mind, yeah.
31:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It is.
31:04 Gary O'Reilly? From 1970s, that was the tessellation of the black and white.
31:07 Chuck Nice? That's a black and white ball.
31:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
31:11 Gary O'Reilly? Now it's very different, but that was the 32 panel ball, yeah.
31:14 Speaker 03 Exactly, that is exactly, it is a glorified soccer ball. We're sending a soccer ball to space. I played soccer as a kid, maybe this inspires me more than I realize.
31:21 Gary O'Reilly? The only thing, now I'm saying, do you make a gigantic space ball? Or do you now daisy chain a certain size?
31:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Every time you say space ball, I can't help it, I'm sorry.
31:28 Gary O'Reilly? I know, it's just, it's email Brooks, see your mind.
31:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And, and just dovetailing that.
31:33 Speaker 03 Yes.
31:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As you know, we have bucky tubes.
31:35 Speaker 03 Yes.
31:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Where you, you, you break the ball in the middle and you extend it.
31:38 Speaker 03 And you expand it.
31:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you use the, the carbon geometry, you mimic that, I guess.
31:42 Speaker 03 That is an idea for how to maybe eventually do a big diameter ring. Is a bucky tube with some curvature.
31:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a bucky inner tube.
31:51 Gary O'Reilly? You better trademark that now.
31:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Bucky Taurus, excuse me, let's get mathematical on it.
31:56 Speaker 03 It changes, it does compress the tiles on the inside.
31:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It would, wouldn't it?
31:59 Speaker 03 Because it's got that curvature. But that's the base concept that we're trying to riff on. But yeah, it's a glorified soccer ball and the clamps are what keep the air pressure in. So you're gonna have force due to air pressure pushing out.
32:09 Chuck Nice? Right, because the air pressure's pushing out, there is no other pressure out there.
32:11 Speaker 03 Yeah.
32:12 Chuck Nice? And so everything, kinda like, kinda like a, kinda like the airplane. Because that's, that's what happens in the fuselage.
32:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Except, it's not zero pressure outside.
32:21 Chuck Nice? Exactly.
32:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And they don't pump the plane to atmospheric pressure.
32:24 Chuck Nice? Right.
32:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They drop it a little.
32:26 Chuck Nice? They drop it.
32:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
32:26 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
32:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But, of course, whatever this is.
32:29 Speaker 03 Yes.
32:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's nothing compared with going to the bottom of the ocean.
32:33 Speaker 03 Oh, right.
32:34 Chuck Nice? Interesting.
32:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because you have 10, 20, 30, 50 atmospheres of pressure.
32:40 Chuck Nice? Exactly, right.
32:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's ready to crush your ass.
32:41 Chuck Nice? That's right.
32:42 Gary O'Reilly? How deep's the Mariana Strange?
32:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's 35,000 feet deep.
32:47 Gary O'Reilly? That's, that's more than Everest.
32:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's, it's farther down than Everest is tall. That's relative to sea level. I'm just saying that in space, you only have one atmosphere of difference.
32:58 Chuck Nice? One atmosphere, that's all you need.
32:58 Speaker 03 The delta is much better, much more favorable.
33:00 Chuck Nice? That's cool, man. I love that, so clamps.
33:16 Speaker 03 Hello, I'm Vicky Barak Allen and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Nailed Grass Tyson.
33:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's an old saying in my field, "How do you make a telescope cost 100 times as much? Put it in space." Wow. So, we try to do everything we can on Earth's surface. There's the same amount of money that gives you one space telescope, gives you 10 or 20 Earth-based telescopes. So, we're very careful about...
33:52 Speaker 03 Really justify.
33:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We have to completely justify what we're doing in space. And so, the cost of getting the experiment up there, doing the experiment, and bringing it back.
34:03 Speaker 03 Yes.
34:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's huge.
34:05 Speaker 03 It is huge.
34:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can build whole laboratories here on Earth for that cost. So, who's doing that calculation?
34:12 Speaker 03 So, this is a great question. When we think about what makes sense to uniquely do in space, we kind of want to rule out all the other different ways to do it here. And we want to do the cheaper things here first. So, the first thing we might do is a zero-gravity flight, right? But if you're working with biology, biology responds on the orders of days and weeks, not seconds.
34:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, the zero-gravity flight, it's at most...
34:35 Speaker 03 20 to 30 seconds.
34:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
34:37 Speaker 03 Affectionately known as the vomit comet.
34:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, when they...I was told this, I had no reason to doubt it. When they filmed Apollo 13 with the director, Ron Howard, that was a million-zillion segments of these 90-second bits. Wow. And they go, "Do it again."
34:56 Speaker 03 Do it again.
34:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the plane has to go up and come down, and then it's stitched together as one continuous zero-G scene.
35:02 Speaker 03 Exactly. I have done 14 of those flights in my life. I've never puked, my parents would disown me.
35:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, God.
35:08 Speaker 03 But they're amazing, and this is one of the...
35:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I would puke like this, by the way. I'm the inadequate stuff. Just so you know.
35:18 Speaker 03 But yeah, so you really, I think you raise a great point, is you want to only use space when you really have to be up there. And so there's a lot of mechanisms and things in biology you can do here. We just want to get to space for the absence of convection, sustained lack of sedimentation for weeks or months at a time. So you do a really long scale experiment like tissue engineering that's going to be economically viable to do in space.
35:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Plus in space, if you needed something to sediment, you just centrifuge it.
35:44 Speaker 03 Yes, exactly. You can always add back in the earth effects in zero gravity.
35:48 Gary O'Reilly? So here I am thinking, who's financing this?
35:50 Speaker 03 Yes.
35:51 Gary O'Reilly? Is it the biotech guys? Is it government? Is it someone with an awful lot of money in the bank and just, yeah, I'll do this because they want to corner that particular part of the market. And biotech in low earth orbit is one aspect of a whole load of off-world industries that might just occur.
36:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And let me put a question just ahead of that.
36:13 Gary O'Reilly? Sure.
36:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I was active in advisory roles in the government at the time this came up. It was the space station, when it runs its course, should it be deputized as a national lab?
36:29 Speaker 03 Right, right.
36:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because if it's a national lab, we already know how to sustain national labs. We've got, there's Los Alamos, there's Brookhaven.
36:38 Speaker 03 In route.
36:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right. So we know that model.
36:40 Speaker 03 Yeah.
36:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And what national labs do is the government does research that's not quite ready for the quarterly report.
36:48 Gary O'Reilly? Right.
36:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or the annual report. It's just a little farther down the horizon. So the government is investing in itself, but on a horizon that ROI, venture capitalist, corporate folks They're not willing to go there. Cannot. That's right. And then you would apply for time on the station.
37:05 Speaker 03 Yes.
37:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the government would supplement that.
37:07 Speaker 03 Right.
37:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so whatever became of that.
37:10 Speaker 03 That it's funny that you mentioned that. That is what they did towards the end of the ISS.
37:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It did happen.
37:14 Speaker 03 ISS National Lab, ISSNL.
37:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It did happen, that's how it happened.
37:18 Speaker 03 It did happen, and it has been.
37:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Pat me on the back.
37:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do you need this reassurance? Yeah.
37:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I was one of several people who that made complete sense in the day.
37:28 Speaker 03 And that enabled my PhD, because as a student, I was able to get basically subsidized support to fly my little self-assembling prototypes via ISS National Lab. Now, I think we're, you know, ten, fifteen years after that, now we are ready for commercial space. And so what NASA is going to do to replace the International Space Station is truly commercial modules, where there's these companies like Acxiom are getting hundreds of millions of dollars in VC investment. People out there really do believe they can make money off of not just biotech, but also ball bearings.
38:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And this would be their module or their buckyball.
38:02 Speaker 03 This would be their tube. They're gonna go back to a pressure cylinder. We want our buckyball to be an appendage on the Acxiom Space Station, or the Voyager Star Lab, or the VAST Space Station. So we will be kind of next-gen habitat tech that gets tested out in the next five years on the attachment side of a more traditional space station that's going to replace the International Space Station.
38:25 Gary O'Reilly? So we're talking about a new financial frontier that's benefiting them, not us.
38:31 Speaker 03 Benefiting who's them?
38:32 Gary O'Reilly? The finance guys. Private enterprise. Private enterprise, the biotech guys.
38:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, there's a medicine at the end. They become billionaires, but then you don't die tomorrow. How's that?
38:40 Speaker 03 That's the trick, is like, it's actually better than just it being science fiction, like going to die on Mars. It's about infrastructure on Earth and where are they selling? It's Earth-based markets. It has to come back down and be of pragmatic use to someone on Earth for it to make sense. So I think that there's a nuance there. It can benefit life on Earth.
38:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Although, there's a lot of research about what you do in space that serves other needs in space. We have a whole colony on the moon.
39:03 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah.
39:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you do something in space, it might be cheaper to take it to the moon than back to Earth. You mean to the studio where you guys faked it?
39:12 Gary O'Reilly? So ironically, you want to get in on the ground floor with investment, but you're out in space.
39:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, I see what you did there.
39:18 Gary O'Reilly? Thank you very much.
39:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it appears, I haven't been able to keep up with all these space startups. And what, it seems that they each have a niche.
39:29 Speaker 03 Yes.
39:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Bit of technology that they want to contribute
39:32 Speaker 03 Right.
39:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To this going forward. And looking, looking forward in the Artemis, not even low earth orbit, Artemis. Every next mission is trying to bring in more private space enterprise.
39:43 Speaker 03 Right.
39:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To basically offload what NASA might have done. Instead NASA pitching tent, get someone else to pitch tent. Right. Instead NASA building orbital lunar space station, get somebody else to do it. And is that going as you'd expect?
39:56 Speaker 03 It is. I mean NASA has this playbook with the International Space Station where they got SpaceX to begin doing commercial missions to ferry crew and cargo to the ISS. It worked incredibly well. People give SpaceX a lot of credit, but really it was that NASA model shifting and the government contracts that enabled SpaceX's amazing growth today.
40:16 Chuck Nice? Also that SpaceX didn't care if they blew up rockets, whereas NASA blows up a rocket.
40:21 Speaker 03 Tax per dollars.
40:22 Chuck Nice? Everybody goes fricking.
40:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? People lose their shit.
40:24 Chuck Nice? Bat crap crazy.
40:26 Speaker 03 Yes. Yeah. They were able to build like a cult of personality around SpaceX because they got people engaged in the iterative prototyping and the failure. But yeah, NASA was never given the space to do that. And that is a tricky dilemma there.
40:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, because you're up against the failure is not an option ethos from Apollo 13.
40:42 Chuck Nice? Love that guy.
40:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When if you're doing something that's never been done before.
40:45 Speaker 03 You have to.
40:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Failure has to be an option.
40:46 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
40:47 Speaker 03 You have to iterate.
40:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's part of your success. Yeah, that is.
40:49 Speaker 03 And so that same playbook that worked with SpaceX for the International Space Station, NASA's doing for the moon called CLIPS. Commercial lunar payload services. They're getting commercial companies to provide the transportation and the landing infrastructure for NASA to then be able to go out and do the science. And I think that there's a, there's a tension between watching NASA seed some of these activities to private enterprise. But what it's allowing NASA to do is what NASA does best. Let's free up NASA from the bit of an albatross of the International Space Station. Let's let NASA go figure out if there's life on Europa. That's something only NASA could do. And I think eventually we have to.
41:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, there's no.
41:26 Chuck Nice? And there's no money in that at all.
41:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
41:31 Chuck Nice? Is there a chance though, because private enterprise is about one thing and one thing only. And that is profit. Is there a chance that things like quality and integrity of mission and things along those lines would suffer?
41:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? By cutting corners.
41:49 Chuck Nice? By cutting corners, pursuits of optimizing profit.
41:53 Speaker 03 I think this is a really important question for NASA and part of what they have done is. Kind of hybrid themselves into this new domain for private enterprise by doing public-private partnership. So VAST and Axiom, they're still working closely with NASA because NASA has these incredible standards for the safety of human spaceflight. So I think what we're hoping to see in the space industry is that we don't just toss out everything that NASA learned. We take the best of what NASA learned and we take some of the maybe better agility that a commercial company would have and we try to marry the two together. Doesn't mean that there won't be the exact risks that you said, but it means that we're trying our best to get the best of both worlds into this next phase.
42:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So by the way, this has fascinating precedence with the birth of airmail. So the government says, hmm, this is new fangled thing called aeroplane? And mail is a big part of who and what you are as a country. Maybe we can move it by aeroplane. So the government says, who can carry this load of mail? At what price? And so people climb over each other to try to get that contract. And by climbing over each other, they're making better and better and better airplanes. And they reached a point where you can carry so many bags of mail, you say, forget the mail, I'm carrying people. And it transitions from just cargo to people.
43:11 Speaker 03 That's a great metaphor.
43:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The model here is just the interplay between the needs of a government and the needs of a private enterprise. I never even thought that that would be the progression, but it makes sense. There's no US Postal Service airplanes. They're flying into Bel Air. Delta Airlines. And apparently, right now, I'm not getting lunch, but... Okay. But so that partnership is so time honored, it's not even thought about anymore.
43:40 Speaker 03 And that's a great metaphor, too, because that inflection moment that we saw with aviation where the cost started coming down, more people started flying. It went from you dress up to go into first class and it was a luxury thing to now...
43:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sweatpants.
43:52 Speaker 03 I think we will eventually see sweatpants to moon. You know, we will eventually see...
43:57 Gary O'Reilly? Go in your pajamas. You go to the supermarket in your pajamas and your Crocs.
44:03 Speaker 03 And then you go up to the lunar colony.
44:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Crocs in space?
44:06 Gary O'Reilly? Crocs in space.
44:07 Speaker 03 I'm more Birkenstocks girl, but yeah, we do.
44:10 Gary O'Reilly? If we're looking at lunar and we're looking at off-world industry, are we looking at data centers, taking them to the moon? Are we looking then at solar power? And that becomes a very different scenario and we're taking away an issue here on the surface of Earth.
44:28 Speaker 03 Right, right.
44:29 Chuck Nice? But what we really want to, because, okay, maybe I'm, I could be wrong here, because you two are the scientists.
44:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We will totally tell you if you're wrong.
44:39 Chuck Nice? But Ariel just said a little earlier, there's no convection in space. The big problem with data centers is they give off an inordinate amount of heat. If there's no convection, then you need some place to push that heat.
44:52 Speaker 03 Yes.
44:53 Chuck Nice? So then you would end up...
44:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's the single biggest challenge.
44:55 Chuck Nice? Right. I mean, what do you, how do you, you know, what do you do then?
44:58 Speaker 03 Yeah. This is, you have hit on the crux of the tension around this idea of AI data centers in space. Take one step back and say, yes, we should be figuring out how to do big infrastructure in space and off-world, just like we were talking about at the beginning of the show. For data centers in particular, what we think is going to have to happen is use a self-assembled approach like TESS array to handle that, because if you have a traditional data center, you have these little volcanoes of heat in the servers, you have to pipe out the heat via conduction to these huge radiators, and all you can do in space is radiative cooling, it's radiative heat transfer. If you had all of your compute...
45:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just to be clear, so there's three ways you can move energy. So one of them is radiative, but the other two, which we live with here, we don't even think about it. It's conduction and convection.
45:46 Chuck Nice? Right.
45:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And convection, as you said, requires gravity for the light stuff to rise. Conduction is really slow.
45:53 Chuck Nice? Right.
45:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's like, I'm jiggling, and now you're jiggling, and then you're jiggling. And, yeah, so that's why the fireplace poker, it'll take 20 minutes for the handle to get hot when the other end is in the space. That's a not efficient way to move energy.
46:07 Chuck Nice? Right.
46:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the radiator is just, it's photons coming off the surface, carrying it out into space. Okay, so that's, so pick it up there.
46:14 Speaker 03 So what we're trying to do with our decentralized tech for building things even besides habitats is can we use this self-assembly mechanism, put the compute that you need on an individual tile, put a solar panel that you need on that tile to get the energy you need, and on the backside is your radiator.
46:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Whoa.
46:32 Speaker 03 And so you're doing hyper-localized energy harvesting and radiative heat transfer for an AI data center.
46:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Brilliant.
46:39 Gary O'Reilly? Are you able to scale that?
46:40 Speaker 03 So that's the that's the vision for something like this that testulates. It's like a honeycomb. You can finally with this architecture make something the size of four football fields that you could never origami up into a single rocket. So that's
46:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Origami is a verb. I love that.
46:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I used to do origami, so I'm feeling it. That one just got me excited. Do you origami? I origami.
47:03 Speaker 03 I origami. Do we all?
47:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But so I love the idea that your tile that is the solar panel.
47:11 Speaker 03 Yes.
47:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's, I mean, to first approximation, that's the energy you're gonna have to radiate away. Right. What because it's just turned into something else. That's right. Becomes thermal rather than photonic. Right. And so a surface the same size as the surface you're receiving the energy would be the about the radiator. About the right size to radiate it away. You just have to make sure it's not facing another surface that's trying to radiate out. Because otherwise Blast that out. They just go Heat it. They heat each other. That's all you're doing is
47:41 Speaker 03 So we We have spun out a company to do this. So my passion for my life is habitats. I really want to scale humans in space with this curved self
47:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? By the way, everybody at MIT spawns out companies, just so you know. That's what that's
47:53 Speaker 03 So we get taught to do.
47:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what they do. She just said it casually. That's a thing.
47:59 Speaker 03 Nice. That's good.
48:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a thing.
48:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's called Pregnant again.
48:05 Speaker 03 Got another company idea. This one goes Fortune 500.
48:10 Speaker 03 So we spun out Rendezvous Robotics. They're gonna focus on what we call the beachhead markets. So big, massive, flat things in space like solar panels, radiators, AI data centers, maybe big communication antennas to get really big apertures, much bigger than you could have gotten, again, having to squeeze it up into a rocket. So Rendezvous Robotics does that. And then I'm gonna keep the nonprofit to do future work on space stations for human spaceflight.
48:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And where does your money come from?
48:37 Speaker 03 For which piece?
48:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Your not-for-profit.
48:39 Speaker 03 Not-for-profit is NASA grants, a little bit of corporate sponsorship, and then philanthropy from visionaries who want to see a vision of space that is more inclusive.
48:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So rich people that just want to live the future.
48:51 Speaker 03 All two of them.
48:55 Speaker 03 I don't get any money from those two.
48:59 Speaker 03 I think it's more that we, and I used to be really obsessed with science fiction when I was younger. I really did want to go live on Mars and elsewhere someday. I think that'd be amazing for humanity. But I changed my focus in Aurelia Institute right around the time of the beginning of the pandemic to say, I actually want to work on space infrastructure that is good for life on Earth. So our donors are people who are happy to support space, but they want it to support life on Earth. They want it to be off-worlding the AI data centers so that you're not having that burden of the heat that's generated inside of a water vapor atmosphere, right? That's why they're excited to support Aurelia. It's a little bit different than the other typical people that you think about in the space industry.
49:37 Chuck Nice? Yeah. Well, the whole Mars thing, I mean, I'm sorry. I've never said this publicly, but get over yourself. I mean, let's be honest here, you know?
49:45 Speaker 03 You don't want to go?
49:47 Chuck Nice? No, I don't want to go. And I don't think anybody else wants to really go. And it doesn't really make sense.
49:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Antarctica is warmer and wetter than Mars, and no one is lining up to build condos.
50:01 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
50:03 Gary O'Reilly? There's no Mars tourist pool.
50:05 Chuck Nice? No. I think the whole Mars thing comes from the fact that ever since somewhere around, you know, the turn of the last century, we developed this fascination and we were enamored of Mars. And it's never left us. It's just never left us.
50:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's Percival Lowell. Yeah, it's him.
50:22 Speaker 03 And the canals on Mars.
50:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And he, and he wrote a book called Mars. Then he wrote a book called Mars as an abode of life. Then he wrote another book called Mars and Its Canals. And everyone is thinking there's life on Mars. And then H.G. Wells heard about this. Then he wrote War of the World with Martians coming and sucking our brains out. So we were off to the races at that point.
50:44 Speaker 03 I'm with you guys on this. I think humans should live in space stations that can spin. Why go to another gravity well? That's only one-third our gravity well, which means we're not going to do well. We're not even sure a woman can bring a baby to term in one-third G. So talk about Mars civilization. It's more like Mars outpost.
51:00 Gary O'Reilly? So going back to off-world industry. Is there a way, is there any thought being put towards harnessing solar power to redirect it back to Earth and make it more a universal?
51:12 Speaker 03 This is my favorite topic. I think AI data centers has captured a lot of people's attention recently.
51:17 Gary O'Reilly? It's the now, but I think a problem that really does need solving.
51:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? China already has a plan to do that.
51:22 Speaker 03 They do.
51:23 Gary O'Reilly? A big flashlight in the sky.
51:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, no, it's microwaves to beam down.
51:29 Speaker 03 There are a bunch of US-based commercial companies who are now trying to compete and beat China to it. So we've known since the 70s that we could do this with microwaves. Just a little scary to think about. So the way it works is you take the energy from these solar panels in orbit, way more efficient because you're getting raw, unfiltered sunlight.
51:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you could do it 24/7.
51:47 Speaker 03 And you can do it 24/7. So you collimate, you gather this energy up, you convert it into microwaves, not trivial, but you can do it, and you beam it down.
51:54 Gary O'Reilly? Shoot it down.
51:55 Speaker 03 But the problem with that is it's very Austin Powers.
51:58 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, lasers in space.
52:00 Chuck Nice? First of all, here's the problem with that. That's called a weapon.
52:02 Speaker 03 Especially as a microwave.
52:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, the plane actually goes off course.
52:07 Gary O'Reilly? Oh, yeah.
52:08 Speaker 03 Zap.
52:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just a puff of...
52:11 Speaker 03 So the company that we work with, Overview Energy, is a flashlight from orbit. So they're doing it with IR. The amazing thing about infrared.
52:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? IR gets a red.
52:19 Speaker 03 Infrared. The amazing thing about that is you can shine it on existing PV arrays on photovoltaic cells, solar panels. So you don't have to build new receiving infrastructure.
52:28 Chuck Nice? It's a transfer of photons to collectors here on Earth. So you take the raw...
52:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, hold on. But you still can't get through clouds?
52:36 Speaker 03 Yes.
52:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So...
52:38 Speaker 03 So it's not, and this is the trade-off. You can have perfect piercing efficiency with microwave, or you can do IR. I think it's probably the only way regulatory-wise on the Earth to get this approved. But then you do, you get attenuated by water vapor. So you have to do it on a clear sky day, or you do it to a place in Australia or Arizona, or desert.
52:56 Chuck Nice? Any desert.
52:57 Speaker 03 And then you place it out.
52:58 Chuck Nice? We got a lot of desert.
52:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Lot of desert in the world.
53:00 Gary O'Reilly? Then again, you've got the logistical transference from where you capture.
53:03 Speaker 03 And interestingly, to connect the two topics, AI data centers and space-based solar power, this company, Overview Energy, that we work with, they just signed a deal with Meta to power Meta's...
53:14 Chuck Nice? Oh, god damn!
53:16 Speaker 03 AI data centers.
53:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So sorry. Chuck has to blow a gasket once per episode.
53:21 Speaker 03 Not the O-rings. We're a little sensitive in the space industry. A little gasket, not an O-ring. The meta deal is going to have space-based solar power power the AI data centers on the ground. So they're not trying to do it in space, which solves some of those challenges we were talking about earlier, radiation, how do you handle the heat? They're going to have the AI data center on the ground, but use 24/7 clean energy to power it.
53:44 Gary O'Reilly? So it's not microwaves that's going to zap anything like the, all the satellites and space junk that's just flying around Earth?
53:52 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, it's not microwaves.
53:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The cross-section of the space station, last I checked, rivals that of a football field, when you include all the solar panels and the radiators and everything. You want to make something bigger than that. That makes you that much more susceptible to the flying Wilendas of space junk, okay? And space junk moving 18,000 miles an hour, and you're just this billowy sail to collect it all, it seems. So how do you square your ambitions for large space architecture with the actual state of space junk?
54:30 Speaker 03 And space debris.
54:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And space debris, and not to mention, at this moment, last I checked, the 14,000 SpaceX satellites.
54:37 Speaker 03 Right, and ever increasing count. For the really massive deployments like those-
54:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Starlink satellites.
54:43 Speaker 03 Starlink satellites, yeah. For the really massive deployments that Ron Devoe Robotics would do, our startup that's trying to do big, you know, surface area solar panels for AI data centers in space or something. The benefit of it being modular is if you know where the debris is coming from, you can pop a few tiles out of the way and you can pass through it. And that's the benefit of it not being a monolithic architecture. It's a decentralized architecture. The better answer is-
55:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or, but that'd be a lot of work.
55:08 Speaker 03 Clean up the debris. The much better answer is invest in remediation.
55:12 Gary O'Reilly? Because you've only got to get it wrong once.
55:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, no, no.
55:14 Gary O'Reilly? Moving those tiles.
55:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, no, no, no, no. Here's what you do. No, you don't pop the tile and let it pass through. What good is that? Let it hit the tile.
55:22 Speaker 03 And then repair.
55:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It'll absorb the debris. And then you just swap it, pop a new tile in. And then you take that tile, frisbee it back down to earth so it burns up.
55:31 Speaker 03 Yeah.
55:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And then you're good.
55:32 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
55:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, I solved that problem.
55:33 Chuck Nice? Or make the whole thing out of rubber.
55:36 Speaker 03 Like flubber.
55:37 Chuck Nice? Like flubber.
55:37 Speaker 03 Yeah. This is great. We'll just combine the beachhead use case with the debris remediation all in one.
55:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There you go.
55:43 Speaker 03 And then pop them on, pop them on.
55:44 Gary O'Reilly? No, but you're hoping for small sized debris.
55:46 Chuck Nice? I have to tell you, that's not a bad idea for space cleanup.
55:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, most space debris is small.
55:53 Chuck Nice? Right.
55:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's the size of a marble.
55:54 Speaker 03 It's very small.
55:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. Yeah. NASA has a, it's a whole website.
55:58 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
55:58 Speaker 03 Yes.
55:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That NASA tracks.
55:59 Speaker 03 And there is actually great progress being made in trying to clean it up. There's ideas coming out of ESA, European Space Agency. There's some companies trying to do Pac-Man for space.
56:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How do you remember what that thing sounds like? Not, not worry about you.
56:15 Chuck Nice? Computer game mode.
56:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let me hear it again, let me hear it again.
56:21 Speaker 03 Perfect.
56:23 Speaker 03 If you can fly through a more, you know, relatively more crowded part of orbit with some big capture area, then you can eventually amass enough mass that you will aggregate and then burn up.
56:35 Chuck Nice? And then burn up in the atmosphere. And, and, oh, that's great.
56:37 Speaker 03 Yeah. So there's some serious efforts to try to remediate the debris problem and not just solve around.
56:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, so it's self, it's a self-destructing object.
56:46 Chuck Nice? So you, you collect and then destroy with no problem.
56:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, because as, as you're collecting, I don't know if it's the mass so much as it'll slow it down.
56:53 Speaker 03 It's the drag, yeah.
56:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah.
56:54 Speaker 03 The mass and then, you're right, I should say the, um, the envelope of this thing to get more drag from the upper edges of the atmosphere.
57:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Exactly. Plus, anything that hits it head on.
57:04 Chuck Nice? Right.
57:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It'll slow it down. Drops it to a lower orbit and so, and then it's, it's a runaway.
57:08 Chuck Nice? I love it.
57:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's, it's a self-cleaning vacuum.
57:11 Chuck Nice? That's what it is.
57:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow.
57:13 Chuck Nice? That's nice.
57:14 Gary O'Reilly? All right, so what we've discussed so far. Is the International Space Station with a life expectancy of about four or five years from now, what's the timeline for what we're discussing with you about space balls, space vacuums?
57:30 Speaker 03 He wants to know when your company's going public. That's what he wants to know.
57:34 Gary O'Reilly? Maybe.
57:35 Speaker 03 Rendezvous Robotics is doing a priced seed round right now, so very early stage company. The habitat work. How much do you need? Yeah, we'd be honored. Oh, my God. The habitat company, or not, sorry, the habitat research within the nonprofit, we think that we want to be able to attach our self-assembling module to whatever the first commercial space station replacement is. They have to have a replacement for the ISS by the time they burn it up. From a national security perspective, we're not going to agree to have no American or Western world space station in orbit. So we're trying to be ready for 2032.
58:10 Gary O'Reilly? Where there's a will, there's a way, and there is a will to make that.
58:12 Speaker 03 There's a will to make that happen. There's a way. That's the biggest will out there. That's exactly right. And so we want to be ready for that 2031, 2032 timeframe, when the commercial space station is up, the phoenix from the ashes, we want to attach to that. So I've been working on this for a decade. I started my PhD in 2016, so it's not like I could just turn this project on and have it be feasible in five years, but 15 years? Yeah. The 10 years we've already done, five more years, get ready to attach a proof of concept habitat, self-assembling habitat is the goal. Rendezvous Robotics, for the beachhead market stuff, they have to show that they can do customer traction in 2027, 2028, 2029. Like, they don't get to have the pleasure that I have of doing longer-term research. They have to really.
58:56 Gary O'Reilly? Have you had any low Earth trials, low Earth orbit trials?
58:59 Speaker 03 Yes.
59:00 Gary O'Reilly? And the success of?
59:01 Speaker 03 We've done two successful low Earth orbit trials inside of the International Space Station, where the tiles, we actually see them autonomously dance. They do this little pirouette in orbit to come together and dock and form the structure. The Rondi robotics, our company, is going to do the first ever in Leo lower orbit, not inside of the ISS, but in free space demo of much bigger, like tiles bigger than the size of this table, about five feet on edge, next year in 2027.
59:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I got a physics question.
59:30 Speaker 03 Yes.
59:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To bring tiles together.
59:33 Speaker 03 Yes.
59:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Aren't they kind of attached to each other on launch? You have to separate them in order to reassemble them in a different way?
59:40 Speaker 03 What we think we're going to do is pack them so the magnets are on the edges of the hexagons and the pentagons, we're going to pack them flat like Pringles in a can. And what will happen is my PhD, I studied, let them all out in one big swarm and see if we can get them all to come together. Too complicated, but it worked in simulation. What we're going to do for the company is a tile comes out of the stack, it moves over, another tile immediately comes up and docks. They're going to move out and they will build a spiral like the reverse of peeling an orange. And it's not going to be as complicated as 32 tiles that form a soccer ball floating around in a big orb.
1:00:15 Chuck Nice? Trying to find each other.
1:00:16 Speaker 03 Which is what I did for my PhD to prove the harder problem of how could you do a big messy stochastic system, semi-random system? We're just going to, for the company, do very pragmatic, connected scale out.
1:00:28 Chuck Nice? There's a kid's toy, I think it's called.
1:00:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To sponsor it.
1:00:31 Speaker 03 Yes, or Lego.
1:00:33 Chuck Nice? I think it's called Connectix, which are, they're like.
1:00:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I've played with those.
1:00:36 Chuck Nice? Magnetic Legos.
1:00:37 Speaker 03 Magnetiles.
1:00:38 Chuck Nice? Magnetiles.
1:00:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, they're segments and they're balls.
1:00:42 Chuck Nice? Right.
1:00:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that the segment has a concave, a concave surface that can attach onto a ball.
1:00:47 Speaker 03 Oh, cool.
1:00:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that the angle can be any, you can make all of the polyhedron with it.
1:00:52 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
1:00:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because my wife is a physicist.
1:00:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:00:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We wanted to make sure that all of their toys were, were probes of laws of physics.
1:01:00 Speaker 03 Oh, I love that.
1:01:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so this, this magnetic connection kit.
1:01:04 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
1:01:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's very cool.
1:01:05 Speaker 03 I've been told that my generation was Lego, so I always say Legos with magnets, but apparently magnetiles are the new thing for kids now, which are basically flat panels with magnets on their edges.
1:01:14 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
1:01:14 Speaker 03 So I wish I had come up with that toy.
1:01:18 Chuck Nice? You kind of did, but for the whole world.
1:01:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, for the whole world. Well, we have to have you back. You live now in New York City.
1:01:24 Speaker 03 I live now in New York City.
1:01:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, welcome to my office here at the Hayden Planetarium. And you came when you were a kid?
1:01:30 Speaker 03 I did, I came when I was a Girl Scout in 2002 or 2003 to do a museum overnight. So we slept in your planetarium.
1:01:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In the planetarium or in the, under the whale?
1:01:39 Speaker 03 Right outside, yeah, right outside, under the whale. But we basically got to do a tour of the planetarium and that is what started my obsession with space. So it's kind of crazy to get to come back.
1:01:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I was director in 2002.
1:01:51 Chuck Nice? Coming here was like a salmon swimming upstream. Came back where it all began.
1:01:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Where it all began.
1:01:58 Speaker 03 So it's an honor, Neil. Thank you.
1:02:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. We will totally have to get you back.
1:02:02 Speaker 03 I love that.
1:02:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And, and tell us where to put money.
1:02:06 Chuck Nice? Yeah. How far along are we? How's that baby coming?
1:02:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What trimester are you in?
1:02:15 Chuck Nice? What trimester? When's the due date on the baby?
1:02:18 Speaker 03 Chuck, I will keep you posted. I promise.
1:02:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. So this has been another installment of StarTalk Special Edition. This one felt extra special, though.
1:02:28 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
1:02:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah. All right, again, Errol, thank you.
1:02:31 Speaker 03 Thank you so much for having me.
1:02:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Being on StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always. Keep looking up.
Previous Cosmic Queries – From Wine to Wormholes Next Cosmic Queries – LIGO, Light, & Lycanthropy Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
