Outer Space The Next Economic Frontier

TITLE: Outer Space: The Next Economic Frontier | WSJ CHANNEL: WSJ Events DATE: 2026-05-29 ---TRANSCRIPT--- I’m Ariel Ekla. I did my PhD at MIT in robotic self assembling space structures. The idea basically being like space legos that build themselves in orbit so that you can ultimately have infrastructure in space that is way bigger than your biggest rocket payload fairing. And something I like to call out for people, especially here in New York, if you’re sitting in this room, you are significantly closer to space than you are to California. You’re only about 250 miles away from the International Space Station. So technically here we are closer to space than Buffalo, New York. Uh which tends to kind of surprise people because we still think of space as very far away or very hard. And so one of the messages that I hope you all take away today, particularly for this business audience, is that space is no longer a sector that may or may not be relevant for your business. Space is a domain. It’s a physical emerging market. It’s a layer, particularly in low Earth orbit, that is very close to Earth and now has amazing potential to benefit people’s day-to-day lives in ways well beyond say GPS or weather satellites, which we’ve all become very familiar with. So today we’re going to talk about infrastructure and architecture. You may be familiar with space industry’s love of Mars. Elon Musk and SpaceX talk a lot about it. We just had the amazing news about Artemis 2 historic mission. Astronauts went farther out than we have ever sent humans before, orbited around the moon and came back. But what if we flipped the script a little bit and said, “Okay, it’s lovely. It’s really inspiring. It’s very important and motivational to have these further out exploration activities, but could we earn our right to be a space fairing species by first showing that we can take care of our first planet? And so today’s talk is going to be about the infrastructure and the opportunities in low Earth orbit immediately relevant near-term opportunities for building an industry that would be profoundly beneficial for our home planet and then hopefully be the jumping off point for a lot of other great infrastructure elsewhere in the near neighborhood of our solar system. So this is the current state of space architecture. If you notice, it’s all essentially um aluminum tin cans. It’s pressure cylinders. And I always thought that it was a little funny that you’re in space where you could grow your architecture in any dimension and yet we still do axial xyz little coordinate planes for space architecture which is a little funny. So the alternative to this, how would we change this paradigm? How could we learn to build things that are not just cylindrical because they don’t have to be squeezed into the tyranny of a rocket tube of a rocket payload fairing? What would it take to get to something like a ring world, a much larger structure often theorized in science fiction that could actually encircle the Earth? Are we that far away from this? It turns out from a science perspective, no. We have the material science. We have a lot of the fundamental knowledge of physics, orbital mechanics to be able to pull off something like this. To be able to scale to this kind of infrastructure though, what we need is a different paradigm for construction. and we need engineering and funding progress. So this is how the International Space Station was originally constructed. This is kind of a blowout model of the current government space station up in orbit. And the crazy thing is that many of these pieces that you see in this diagram were assembled like this by hand. So, astronauts doing an incredibly risky and courageous maneuver in what we call EVA suits, extra vehicular activity suits. We call them that because a space suit is essentially an entire space vehicle. It’s just wrapped around your body closely. Building some of the most advanced technology known to humankind by hand. And this is kind of crazy. It was very impressive for the first few decades of human space flight. But we know that this is not going to scale for speed or efficiency or cost or even for safety. It is a little bit wild that this is how we still build in space. And so for my PhD at MIT, what I looked at was other ideas or archetypes for how can you construct in a more autonomous fashion really interesting things. And it turns out from nature we have a lot of lessons about self assembly. So there are examples of how DNA self assembles uh protein and DNA self assembles in your cells in your body all the way up to ants and termites self assembling into little bridges that can actually span gaps that would be too big for a single ant to be able to cross. And so building on some of these different lessons about pieces parts in nature where the logic for the final assembly is actually built into the constituent parts. What I designed were these tiles, self assembling. We call them lovingly space Legos where there’s intelligence built into each unit that helps all of the units come together in some type of a predetermined shape that can also grow and scale a lot like this plant that you’re seeing on the screen. So, I’m going to play a video for you that is an artist’s render of the work behind this concept to enable really massive scale self assembly of space structures. and then we’ll get into the tech and some of the investment opportunities and business opportunities that we hope will come out of this kind of innovation. So, I’m going to talk over the video a little bit as you guys see it. So, we’re situating ourselves here in orbit around the Earth. You’re going to see a rocket take off. This was modeled on a Falcon 9. So, we can do this even before Space X’s Starship becomes operational. This could stay in orbit around the Earth. It could go to the moon. In this case, you’re going to see it go all the way to Mars. It doesn’t really matter. We just want to be in orbit around a celestial body. And that’s because when you’re in orbit around a planet or a moon, you’re in freef fall. So, you feel like you’re floating, which is why you see all those amazing videos of astronauts playing with water and all the physics feeling very different. So, now that we’ve got to our orbit, you’re going to see these tiles that are basically packed flat like Pringles in a can or like Pez dispenser if people remember those candies from like a decade ago. These tiles pop out one by one and they have very powerful magnets on their edges. So what these magnets allow them to do because there’s floating, there’s no friction, they’re not being weighed down by gravity, the magnets pull them together really elegantly. There’s no propulsion required, which is useful in this case because propulsion is non-renewable. Once you’ve used up all your chemicals that are on your particular propulsion unit, you don’t have anything left. And so this structure allows us to passively with just the power of the magnets bring these tiles together. And once one ball or bucky ball has formed, multiple balls can form together for a future space station. So if that was the artist’s render, this is all of the engineering that actually makes it happen. So I’ve been working on this since 2016, so about a decade now. First at MIT and now at my spinout Aurelia Institute. We have this combination ecosystem. Aurelia Institute is a incubator nonprofit where we do really far future space research and then we have Aurelia Foundry which is our VC fund where we can invest in technology that makes sense to spin out. This is some technology that we have spun out. I’ll show you a little bit more where it’s headed after this but these are the iterations of how we actually test prototypes like this in orbit. So we start on zero G flights. Has anybody here been on a zero G flight or familiar with it? Affectionately known as the vomit comet. So, this is a plane that does what you’d want a plane never to do. The plane pitches really steeply upwards at 45°, noses over, points towards the ground at 45°. At the top of that arc, you get to float. If the pilots are good, you get about 20 to 30 seconds of true weightlessness. It is incredibly sublime. And then you do that arc 30 to 40 times in the sky. So it’s like a roller coaster in the sky. This is how NASA trains astronauts. It’s how we test our work before we actually take it to space proper. So this is an earth-based simulation. You’re basically in a short period of freef fall inside of a plane. So we do all kinds of testing on platforms like these on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. Yes, Katy Perry did go up in that rocket. We went about 7 years earlier, but sadly not myself as a human, just our research payload. Uh, and then we have graduated now to multiple tests inside of the International Space Station. So, we take these tiles and they’re smaller than what they would ultimately be as habitat scale and we test them in miniature to make sure that we get the algorithms right and the code right and the autonomous self assembly with the magnets right as a precursor to now preparing to really build at scale. So, these are photos. Um, you’re actually looking down at Earth through the Koopa window of the International Space Station. Those tiles are about the size of my palm and they self assembled into this beautiful little fuette. You might be wondering why is it a ball? So, this is a subsection of the ball. It turns out that to get stuff to space, the part that’s really expensive is the exoskeleton. It’s the surface area that’s going to encapsulate the breathable air for the humans or the satellites or whatever is going to be stored inside of it. And a given for any given surface area, you want to maximize the volume that you get on the inside. And a sphere is the perfect shape. But it turns out it’s kind of hard to manufacture a sphere and pack that up in bits in a rocket. So, a bucky ball or a glorified soccer ball, which is the shape of that ball that you saw in the artist’s render video, that is an approximation of a sphere. And that’s why we’re so interested in that geometry. So, here’s a video from the International Space Station um from years ago now. Actually, we’ve continued to really progress through the hardware and you’ll get to see what it looks like. So, this is an astronaut’s hand or two hands inside of a glove box while they’re floating in orbit. You’ll see the tiles be very gingerly released. He’s trying not to impart any emotion to them. The field of the magnets cause them to do this dance to piouette and dock together. So if you ever put your MacBook charger into your Mac and you feel how it kind of seats itself, that magnet seating, that’s exactly what you just witnessed live. Now imagine that happening at the scale of a tile that is as big as this stage and then 32 of those tiles coming together to form a really massive structure and that is the engineering work that we’re now doing and that we’re scaling up to. So I mentioned before that we have this combination ecosystem Aurelia Institute and Aurelia Foundry. So the nonprofit research org and the VC fund. We have just spun out our first company to take this self assembly work forward. It’s called Rendezvous Robotics. My passion is really human space flight and turning this technology into habitats. What Rendevu Robotics is going to focus on is near-term beach head markets in the space industry that need massive scale self assembly but are not quite as complicated as habitats. Turns out it is really hard to get humans to be able to breathe in space, do all of the environmental control and life support systems that you need. So rendevous is going to focus on things like massive solar panel arrays in orbit. You can get very efficient solar power when you’re up above the clouds. Things like massive communication antennas for the national security applications for the US government. And yes, maybe even AI data centers in space. I think we can have a great uh debate off the stage about the technical pros and cons of this as a concept. But because there is so much capital being thrown at this industrialization of AI, we would really like to be able to be that partner that can support the inspace construction at massive scale. If you’re trying to build something that is three or four football fields in size, you’re not going to fold that up like origami into a rocket. You’re going to have to learn how to do modular self assembly in space. So we’re really excited for the future of rendevous robotics. Taking this forward within Aurelia, which is the incubator, we’re thinking about this technology roadmap. So, we’ve built a 30foot habitat mockup. It’s actually up in an MIT lobby right now in Boston if anybody would like to come and see. And then this is a little bit of our road map towards the other structures that we’ll be building in space. The first application that we think we’re going to have for a habitable version of this infrastructure in orbit is going to be a replacement to the International Space Station, but with a very specific flavor. And so this is kind of the next few minutes of the talk is going to take you guys through what is a near-term pragmatic, you know, something that will have revenue that could actually be generated in lower Earth orbit based on this type of habitat tech. So, one of the motivating factors is that the International Space Station, which we’ve been continuously inhabiting since the early 2000s, is about to get shut down. NASA has decided that they’re going to decommission it in 2030 or 2031. What decommissioning means is carefully take everything out of it and let it burn up completely. Let it incinerate in the atmosphere basically and be no more. Um, they’re very good at this. We know how to do it safely, but it is a huge gap for the United States to not have a commercial or in this case originally a government space station in orbit. There are some proposals to try to extend its life. But what NASA has been doing is taking a playbook that they did very successfully with SpaceX where they basically said, “Hey SpaceX, we want you to get us to the International Space Station. We don’t want to have to supply the transportation anymore.” and they built up space as a success in being able to do that. NASA is now saying, “Hey, we think we’ve spent enough time as a nation in low Earth orbit with government money. This emerging market is really finally starting to build out. We’re going to let commercial companies build space stations in low Earth orbit. And we NASA will go further out. We’ll build the moon base on the moon like Jared Isacman, the new NASA administrator, just announced. will go look for life on Europa. So, there’s this moment right now that’s about to open up for the first ever commercial space station operators. And there’s maybe six companies that are vying to be the replacement to the ISS. It’s really urgent. We need to be able to replace this infrastructure, but we should also expand. We shouldn’t build it in exactly the same way the second time that we built it the first time. And so what Aurelia Institute is looking at is how could we add a specific type of capability here to a future space station. So we would not be the entirety of the space station. We would use the tesseray self assembling tech that you guys saw to self assemble a biotech module. And this is why. So two trends here to kind of call out and take away from this talk. The first is just the drop in cost to get to space. So 15 years ago under the Obama administration with the kind of the end of the NASA shuttle program, it was about $50,000 a kilogram to get mass to orbit to get cargo to orbit. Today is about $1,500 a kilogram. And with SpaceX’s Starship coming online, it’s anticipated to be under $200 a kilogram, which is remarkable. That’s like FedEx. If you can ship something around the earth, cargo, not the humans, we’re a little bit more fragile, a little more expensive, but if you can ship cargo around the world, you can ship it to space. It’s really remarkable how much reusable rockets have profoundly changed the economics of space, which is why it’s plausible to have these massive scale buildouts of say hundreds of thousands of space Legos building infrastructure in space because we can finally afford to ship that mass up to space. The second really interesting driver is that we’ve had 20 years of really beautiful, exquisite biotechnology research that has been done by the government and some academic partners on the International Space Station across a whole range of different topics. And it’s ironic now that we’re about to lose the International Space Station, right? When we could finally be scaling up cures for cancer, organoids, tissue engineering, all of these really interesting applications that have been developed in microgravity because it turns out when you’re floating, the science performs really differently, particularly biology because so much of our biology evolved here, in fact, all of it evolved here on Earth in a gravity-based environment. So, with the rise of AI models, wanting ever more data about biology, and the opportunity now to build on all of these NASA insights, and the drop in cost to get to space, we think we’re about to see basically a little explosion of new startups and new activity in this domain. So, these are a few specific trends to watch at the intersection of biotech and space. The first is tissue engineering. So, a wonderful example here is things like artificial retinas. These are super delicate little structures that get implanted by a surgeon in the back of your eye. In the future, if this company that we’re working with, if they get FDA approval, it would be able to restore sight due to loss of sight from macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentotosa. So, basically, as you age, if your eyes are giving out on you, this is an opportunity to have a replacement of your retina. The reason it works so well is that when you’re floating in a gravity environment, the delicate little layers of the retina, which take 200 layers of the super super thin layering, they sag if you’re on Earth. They don’t sag when you’re floating. And so you can get this incredible quality improvement. It’s like a manufacturing quality improvement by taking some of these processes to space. Second category is drugs that are based on aging. So it turns out in the zero G environment, we’ve started testing these little things called organoids. Has anybody heard of organoids here? It’s a model of organs. So these are tiny little clumps of cells that are artificial models of bigger organs in your body. It’s really important because it allows scientists to grow them artificially without having to practice on real organs every time we want to develop a new cure or a new drug. And it looks like these little balls of artificial organs, these little things that we call organoids, they grow better in zerog than they do on the ground. They have better 3D shape to them and they mature a little bit faster, which means that that’s a great target to test cancer drugs and Alzheimer’s drugs on that tissue in space. So really, really profound. And then the most exciting example of the three, which should be relevant to some of you here if you’re tracking um a drug like Kruda. So Merc’s current cancer drug, $30 billion drug, like 30 billion in revenue. Amazing drug for Merc. It’s a cancer drug. They took an early formulation to space to figure out the crystallizing the protein crystallization in the drug and that helped them take it from a IVbased drug where you have to go into the hospital to a shot that you can do as an outpatient. Now what they used space for was just to get the data to be able to make this new formulation. They do not have to manufacture every dose of Kruda in space. So it’s a huge unlock for Merc. We’re super excited to be working with a slew now of different biotech partners to explore this potential of microgravity for science data that can change your drug formulation and then maybe eventually manufacturing of really unique drug formulations in zero g. So, if you’re curious how all of this works within a space station and within this new model of space stations that we’re pioneering, these self assembling ones, this is a little bit about what the system architecture, what we like to call in the space industry, the conops, the concept of operations might look like. So, you have this payload fairing from the tip of a rocket spits out the tiles very gingerly, one by one. They self assemble into this bucky ball, this glorified soccer ball. On the inside of the soccer ball, we have outfitted it to be a next generation biolab. This means best-in-class robotics, uh, benchtops for not just astronauts, but citizen scientists. So, I usually say it about this point in the talk, if you guys have kids, your kids may very well commute to space for work. And maybe not 9 to5 every day, but in the way that you would go two weeks on to go do a study in Spalbard in the Arctic and then come home for two weeks or three weeks on an oil rig and then you get two weeks off. That potential is now coming for space applications in orbit like this. And so you could very well have your child or a niece or a nephew be a scientist who doesn’t have to be a NASA astronaut their entire career, but they get to go to space to be part of this new wave of industry. And so we are really intentionally designing now because as architects we have to think about this 20 years in the future. We are designing the interiors of these bio facilities in space to be more welcoming to a much broader swath of humanity. And then you see a little uh Dragon capsule. So this is an example of a current delivery vehicle that is part of the SpaceX ecosystem that is able to dock with that space station, bring up samples, bring up supplies, and then take some of the research back down, take some of the samples or the produced activities back down. So we’re coming to the end of the talk here and I just wanted to call out two really big picture ideas that I think you can take away from the field of space architecture which feels very new to many people. So the first is I just shown you this example of an orbital biolab near-term a lot of capital being put into this right now. But if we take a step back, the reason that space is such a special domain to build in is that you can make things that you would never have been able to make on Earth. And so I just want to show you guys this example as one of the two closing thoughts. This was meant to be Newton’s scenet. So it was meant to be a memorial to Isaac Newton. It was designed in the mid to late 1800s. It’s a 150 meter span dome. And those tiny tiny little things that you guys see on the screen at the bottom, those are the humans for scale. This could not be built at the time because it would be near impossible to build an arch of that span. But this is the kind of monument to humanity. If we have ambitions as a society and as a space fairing species to go out and do really big things, this is the kind of thing you could uniquely build in space because you don’t have gravity. You’re going to have other forces. You’re going to have some air pressure trying to push out against a vacuum. But this is the kind of incredible monumental architecture that we could be building in space. And so I really like to encourage people to think about space as this domain that opens up not a blank slate, but an incredible new series of opportunities for humanity. And it’s worth also thinking about this in the context of what I call the anthropocsmos, which we need to do a little bit of better branding on that. We need a slightly less of a tongue twister, but the idea is to call into consideration this notion of the anthroposine, which is the era of Earth’s history where we’ve now come to accept that humanity has a really dominant role on Earth for good and for worse. If we’re about to go into our next era where we will have all of this opportunity and potentially a big impact as a species on the near neighborhood of our solar system, that would be the era of the anthropo. And it comes with really amazing opportunities but also a lot of responsibilities. And so at Aurelia Institute we try to think of the balance of those different opportunities and policy work about the responsibilities. And then the final idea that I want to leave you with today if Newton’s scen is an example of kind of looking outward and looking up and into space about what we could build. This is an idea to anchor us back on earth like we started at the beginning of the talk. So there’s this notion in science fiction about off-worlding, not off-worlding the humans, but off-worlding the heavy industry. So get mining, get chemical byproduct manufacturing that pollutes our waterways. Try to eventually get those industries off of Earth. You can do them in space in some cases in a much more responsible way. It’s not like we’re just going from polluting Earth to polluting space. When you’re in the vacuum, you don’t have a water vapor atmosphere that’s trapping a lot of this stuff in the way that we trap it down here on Earth in our biosphere. So, there’s a really profound opportunity to begin to think of space as a tool for Earth. So, space exploration is not about abandoning Earth. If you don’t want to go live and die on Mars with Elon, that’s okay. He’s allowed to do that, making incredible progress towards it. But we can also use space technologies as a lever to help Earth and to try to treat Earth well and maybe eventually let Earth recover as a garden planet. And I think one of the maybe the first applications of this is things like AI deniseters in space. They’re the first new wave of industrialization that hasn’t really been built extensively on Earth yet. Maybe it’s a great opportunity to move that natively into space. begin thinking about offloading off-worlding that carbon footprint before we have a big scale out. So, there’s some really interesting near-term opportunities with things like off-worlding. And on that note, I just want to say I think it’s time to build. I hope I’ve shown you a bunch of different ways that we might be able to get there with self assembly, future of orbital biotech in space, and then also just these grand ambitions that I think we can have as a society, as a species around going out to space and having great exploration opportunities, but also thinking about space as a tool for Earth. And let’s put space to work for Earth. Thank you so much.