Space Debris and Future Missions

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W Y place in the universe where science and pop culture collide Our talk begins right now This is Star Talk, spepecial Eedition, whichich means I got Gary O'Rey right next to me, Gary. Hey, Neil. And Chuck Nice. What's up, Neil. All right. So Gary, I don't know how you came up with this subject. You and Lane over in L. All right Yeahah, we had a little help from Lindseayy Walker. And Lindsey Walker. Yeah. my co author, Lindseay. Yes and credit to both Lindsey and Lane All right, let's get into this. Consider this, the ISS is to be decommissioned. International sppace Station for those R We've never listened to the show ever at all. That's twenty thirty, twenty thirty one. So now you start to extend your thought process, so what will replace it What will Earth' orbital space look like What new technologies are going to emerge Will Earth orbit become an annex for our offwlding art industries. I love that phrase offwlding that just just s It sounds so like futuristic and spacey. I mean, I have to get off worldorld Right now I'm telling you, I'm a wanted man. I have to get off. Offwor. Yeah. So I mean, that's gonna to be prefixed with a big old dollar sign. Yes. Once you start to get into those areas. There's a lot to unpack, so let's bring on our guests, Jo? All right. we got a guest here You know, it'll take me half the show to read the credentials here and then I'll read them all No I'm gonna read to a more. Okay. We have Ariel Ekblau, do I pronounce your name correctly? Good sir. Ariel, welcome back to StartTalk. Thank you. You were last on during COVID. Yes. And I have no memory of anything that happened during COVID. And I didn't even have COVID. that's not my excuse. So you were founder and CEO I love Anybody who's that of anything. And CEO. Founder and CEO of the Ourelia Institute whose mission is to bring humanity space exploration future L working on it. Oh. making the future now. Now. Yes, okay. Founder and director of the MIT Space exploration Initiative. Look at that. M. That'. serious stuff N Hashtag nerd would also surffive. Yeah Hashtag nerd, Geek nerd squared. NASA lunar sururface innovation sortched him on the executive committee of that. o. Obiously ye. 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. just like, I don't know. They never did learn to fly. They are. Oh God.. The underachiever. I was get it. Y parents are air Force pilots, bothoth of them. Yes. My parents are both pilots. A disappointment's left, though, double pilot parents you gott to go to space. That's. Oh that's so true. Okay. Mom, dad, stanle the atmosphere. I don't care. So what piece of hardware is on Mars that you touched? Yeah, I got to work on Sherlock on the Perseverance Bver, Mars twenty twenty, which is looking for in NASA's classic terminology. I can't say looking for life Looking for signs of past habitability on the Martian surface. Look at that for That's the current rover. It's still an active rover.'t tell's got a deer stalker hat and a magnifying glass It running around on the Martian surface. Vy Sherlock Holesy? 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 You didn't like sneeze on it before they launched it Not to my knowledge. Now there is life on. No way this aerial snock on Mars come to life. snuck past that planetary protection protocol. Right Andram inous strain. It's the aerial strain. Oh God, the horror They bake those things out there. They gott to really heat them up before they send them. So I'm pretty sure that my little fingerprint gets gets baked of that aluminum O the booger that you put on it when youop. So Okay, let 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.. So the original sppace 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 nineties? So that was thirty five years ago and No one would come near Any peace technology that's thirty five years old. Today. Oh, for sure. If I say, o, look at this shoulder mounted cell phone or whatever.. So we have a space stationell that is way older than anything you would dign to use todayoday here on Earth. So just put put this in context now, did they not build in its obsolescence? Future proof. Yeah, future proof Or future proof.. But either we know it's be we're going to drop it out of the sky or we have swappable battles everywhere. Now the future' become exponential. So tell me. Yeah. Yes, so how do you prepare? I think that's a great point. Yeah, it's basically debated, thought about in the eighties, debated, and then built in the nineties Flown in the early two thousands, so it's like a home that desperately needs a Rno. 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 going to replace the International Space Station when it does get decommissioned twenty thirty, twenty thirty one Is decommissioned code for Drop it O out of orbit? Fiery death Fiery death. I going dec. This is sizeable. Yes, and it's no small feat for NASA to be able to do that well. I think there's a lot of know orbal dynamics planning and reentry drag eng What's the difference between something that large and Th things that are deorbiting all the time. Yeah, whether they burn up completely on reentry, 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. Unless you're China, in which case you don't care where you throw your garbage Wh not Throwing your garbage all over the world? This is a entrenchant example because the Chinese did get in some trouble for Tang Gong, one of their earliest space stations for not deorbiting 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 safely to do it safely and well means you drop it into the great Bow of space which is the Pacific Ocean Yes. Right. And not is one third of all longitude on Earth If you't plunk a satellite into that, damn, you got problems right. Yeah. Just don't hit pointoint Nemo Right Beuse on Point Nemo, theo. Point Nemo is the most remote. Is that wherehiny Nemo went? If only. Well we know where he was. Yeah. Yeah That was good. I was learn from the best. I' learned from the best. That was so good. Okay. So what is point N Nemo is the most remote place on Earth. So if you're in Point Nemo, you're farther away from any other human than any other landmass But when the interternational Space Station flies over, then you're only two hundred and fifty miles away from a human. So you know when it goes over Point Numero, you're closer to space humans than you are to Earth humans. Wow. And doesn't that sound like heaven to be close if you would like to be to Earth human if you're like a hermit, yeah,. Is there any way you can disassemble before you bring it back. Yes. I suspect that there will be part of the Con ops concept of operations is they're going to pluck some of the different modules of rather than just trying to have the entire kind of unwieldy structure with all those solar p. Why would you do that? Is it because you can reuse it something from thirty five years ago? So let the damn thing burn up. Yeah. So this is the crux of NASA's plan that just got reanounced with Iignnition. So we have Jared Isaacman, 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 interternational sppace 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 deorbited. That's a pretty damn good plan. That a quool plan. Yeah. that means sending astronauts. out and risk of that and you're putting people in jeopy. Space construction, man. What could go wrong? That is awesome. Come on. We all know that when you have space construction, okay, that a jump scare is coming.es. 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? We just unpacks that. So the biggest module was what could fit in the payload bay ofump. So there's no piece up there that's bigger, unless you you don't to fold it. But so all those cylind cylindrical pieces They like within Crazy tolerances. Crazy tolerance.ight. because you max that out. R. And so the shuttle and the space station complete each other. Oh. Are we talking flatack? We are. We're talking IKEA. NSA we' gonna go to IKEA you took the thought out of my mind because we've told Flat lows equal dollars in terms of playload Yeah Okay, go ahe. No, no, so this is where you're taking it. Wh isere do you get your cues for design? Now we know we're going flat pack everything. Where do we get our cues from design? Is it the thirty five year old tech or are we thinking something or even further back than that? 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 faring. And there's this idea from Buckminster Fuller, so even well before the International Space Station was designed of bucky balls. Geodasic domes. Why do we love spheres in space? Because for a given surface area, you're optimizing for all that volume, Most efficient shape. Okay, I can't resist saying this. You're inventing spaceballs. Sorry. I could not clect that in my mind. sly, but surely.ly. sppaceballs. Okay. When exactly does Dark Helmet enter the? Is that his name Dark helmet? Yes. Darthader N not Darth Vader.ark hel. seelf assembl spaceballs.es. Very nice. That's the ide Either why not or in addition to would you not use pr since we are now able to print extremely strong, very light metals. So three D printing. Yes. three D print.. Yes. I think the answer is yes and. Okay. So we definitely want innovative structures in space. We want self assembling modular things. Gotcha. The reason we want modularity that's not just three D printed is it's when it's three d printed,'s done. It's a done deal. If you get damage on one of my modular flat pack panels since popped out their can self assembled, you can remove it toout popping off or if you had a window tomorrow Lgg Lgos Okay magnet. They're making magnets. Yes. Nice. Okay, we'll get onto magnets. but And since you're in zero G, you willll never step on a Lgo a Lgo piece and hurt your feet..' here a astronut in the middle. Well, it's always in the middle of the night. go Ler. So if you're making the spherical construction, that's tessellation of shapes. So that becomes biomimicry? It does. My PhD at MIT was really inspired by ideas and biology of how nature self assembly. What department was that? I was in between Aerostro C sixteen and the MIT media lab Wh is very creative architecture. Yeah, I know, yeah. we've had people from there here before. Right so they couldn't fit you anywhere, so you had to straddle. R. Yeah. All right. All right. Okay, the irony is you wouldn't trust a thirty five year old technology. No I wouldn't. But we'veone to Mother Nature for cueses to design the f. Tell me some of your nature cues. Yeah, yeah That's cool. Self assembly, like how proteins fold with your body or fold up into DNA. Very cool. And then other examples of small units like swarms of termites and ants. They can take their tiny little bodies and bridge that is bigger than. I've seen that. They self attached to each other. Here's hell out create structures. If they had a bigger brain, we would be nervous. Yeah. they would be. 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. Y. Yeah because they 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. Adam gave himself for us all guys. 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.. you have to perform some math magic to get us back at the top of that list. Otherwise we're fourth. We whales, dolphins, elephs. normalized. Eactly. However, that's not even true. We're only fourth We're only the top of the brain to body weight ratio among mammals.. If you bring in mid sized birds, R And birds are very light. Yes, they are. Yeah. You very mid sized birds. We are behind birds. Wow. And you know who beats everybody out? Some species of ant You know they got big heads. Yes, A heads and own ants. I'm just saying. We're just back checkkinging us here talkking about these ants. Yeah. you're just saying, you got ants doing everything you're describing. They're probably doing calculus in their heads. That would' be f. Yeah. Stupid humans around calculus. Jesus Christ. Look at them building above ground housing. masses abbove ground housing. That's right. takeake them to Mars. They're gonna help us do that all that below ground. have them do all the construction youo 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 One of the reasons why I wrote, Take Me too yourour Leer It's to explore All that is possible in this universe beyond what has yet to be imagined So that for your first alien encounter, Be prepared Youll have some anticipation of what they could look like What kind of ship they arrived in You should or should not say or should or should not presume I narrated the audiob book prrint version is available as well. 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So you'll still have time seell a few jokes. Thomas Edison State University, the university that works for you. visit tsu.edu You know, recommendations can be great. Maybe someone recommended this podcast and here you are But home projects are different. If a podcast isn't your thing, you lose a few minutes. If you hire your cousin's neighbor to mount your TV, you might end up with a lopsided screen and wall damage Maybe I know a guy just isn't enough for your home. That's why Thumbtack works. It matches you with top rated local pros with photos, reviews, and credentials all in one place. For your next home project, try Thumbtack. Hire the right pro today. erial I want answer to Why are you and NASA ignoring what every sci fi writer Nose.. You rotate your space station. You do.. that. No one has to complain about bone loss and zero G and muscle loss. and I rotate something so you get artificial ground or ear problems. I got a five step plan. You doing this This is phase zero. Yes. Oh,t tell. Self assembling first. Y pack them flat in a rocket get that IKE of furniture. Fine. Pop them out like a little pz 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 for the companies that are doing research.ure, scientists like where I come from MIT, all of that. But then the future absolutely is to try to tessellate structures and then spin them. And so at Aurealia Institute, our nonprofit, where we do all of this space architecture research We just released a paper on artificial gravity and our particular take on it. All right, so you said about magnetism solf assembly But there's a lot of magnetism around in space and other environmental issues So you've got that to do What do you mean? What what are you talking about? space ji Earths magnetic field. Yeah. Gott toa consider that when we have magnets. Yes, space jum. Not not all that strong. And then you've got to make sure you've got one hundred percent seal. Yes on every facet of every tile. This was the hardest question. Yeah. I was gonna say, yeah, that makes sense. 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 br're using magnets in lieu of bolts and other fastening devices. In addition, so the magnets pull the tiles together while they're still separated. So instead of using propulsion for a consable put a force of nature to do this. a free force of nature Exactly. because you couldn't do it on Earth. And this is the elegance of assembly space. You don't have to w force,. There's no friction So I hadn't put all this together the way you clearly have If you have magnetic forces To otherwise move pieces in space, Yes, requires some act of propulsion. Right. And if there's already a built in force, then you've got it. You don't need then the magnets come. Okay. Yes. All right, so now step two I finish one talk right. Okay. So now you' explain it. Now we use the fancy word Tessllate. Okaykay, fine. You Tessllate, And what's that the other word she used Im telling you. You're going to build a structure that you then will set Rotating. Yes What sets it into rotation? A So the initial sphere that we're talking about, the bucky ball is not going to rotate.ight. What we're working on for the artificial gravity is more of what we call like a xylem. You know, those tubes and plants that go up vertically along the length of the plant stem. Yes. We want to align It has a word xylem? Zylem, Xylem and phloum. This is my like fourth grade memory from Okay Syilum and Floum. So this is separate from the self assemblying 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 like that go. But something has to take on the angle momentum in the opposite directions. So what is that going be? So we have a bunch of balanced ballast.. And the structure that we're doing is we're trying to think about, if you think about like a typical ring, like two thousand one space Odyssey. Typical typical two thousand five ring in the movie. Yeah. five nurse. Yeah typical It's basically a ribbon, some kind of. Yeah yeah. And that's And then the gravity Yesadial is radial. The dirty little secret about that is if you're a human walking along that ring, you're gonna feel different gravity your head. That's your feet That' your feet. Yes. which is a lot of weird cross coupling effects for your vestibular system. Right. We've seen unl list the ring is really huge. Yes, and then the difference will be small. And then we're talking like, yeah, a hundred kilometers. if you could pull off a ring that big, very small. And then youon't feel sick, right? becausecause you're spinning, but you're spinning so sl slow that it much diameter How do we do artificial gravity in ten years and not one hundred years? That massive ring could be one hundred years from now. What do we do in the next ten 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 foot toe change in the geometry a little bit Ultimately, it is a ring of cylinders that then gets spung. Right. So everywhere within a cylinder has the same force of gravity. That's the idea. Okay that same. But then what am I doing in that cylinder? I want to get to over here. That's where the gym is and this is where the mess hall is. 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 One G to zero. Gradually floating, but you can do a ladder, you can do ergonomic techniques to help get the humans up. So to be so worried about this variation from feet to head. Yes. When you apparently weren't worried when I was in no gravity at all. So what's a little gravity gradient between friends? 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 zer. How do you know that? We know that because of amazing studies that it might take some dude walking around right now who has zero balance at all. He's just falling all over the. think he's drunk. He's the one do the experiment on it. Exactly. the carnival rides, we get the gravitron go and we play with people inside of it Kind of true.. I remember the gravitron, that's the rotating Yeah thing ye Yeah. the centrifuse. Flying softerer, yeah yeah a human sed centrifge. So we learned some from that from studies and that. And then there's also been a lot of science about when the astronauts first get to the International Space Station, sometometimes 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 you real gravity or you in zeroy, 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. That's very cool. Yeah ye. 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. There's no down. There's no up or down.. Exactly right. Okay, gotch you. 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 So it's like little crystal chamers is 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 oursel. Okay so you touched on biotech,' do basically Almost everything you can do. and the space station here on Earth in terms with you have the protein folding, alpha foold three. Yep, alphold three. All those aspects that gave them ninety plus percent accuracy Al four three got the Nobel Prize, right? With David Baker and Demis Sasabas there AI folding for proteins. Yeahah, just on theotein has the head of IT protein folding folding. Yeah yeah. Yeah. here's a great question. What can you do uniquely in the zero G environment that you can't do on Earth? think only know one thing, can I say? Yeah ye Perfect ball bearings. Yes. Wow Because the forceces right. L spector sphere That's the comment. Yeah. the sphere minimizes service area and maximizes volume Yeah. perfect ball bearing. That's all I know that you can make in space. 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. Right. You have no sedimentation, nothing sinking down. And for a lot of biological biotech processes, that's huge to get rid of sedimentation. And by the way,ully, they took a case of wine. They did put it up into the space station. You have a bottle, I feel like someone's got to give you a bottle. I can neither confirm or. No the point was, so one case went up And once stayed on Earth. Yeah. All right. And then they left it there for like they did the twin experiments. experiment. Yeahes, the twin experiment. It was exactly a case of identical wines. And they brought it back and they wanted me to comment officially on what effect Zero G had on the wine. And I feel bad saying this, but If you're in zero G The sediment doesn't know what to do.. And so that's the same thing as you go into your cellar, pull out a bun, shake it up and put it back feel like it's gonna make it teerble. you're simulating the one in space.. You just shake everything all the time. Dr. Tyson, here's the wine. I cannot believe you bring this to me.op wine is absolute swell. Don't st to me. Keep going down the list. Yeah. So what can you do? So you don't have any convection. have sedimentation.ight. 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. Oh wow 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 LambDivision that's doing artificial retinas two hundred layers of a really delicate little protein And if you do it on Earth, you get little sagging effects and with two hundred layers that amplifies an error. Is this lasx? It's not lasx. It's not lyx. Yeah. It's a different process. it'sacteria. Dobson that's why it ye. ye. Yeah. So it's making Lasx is when they use light to make a change to your eye 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 Eth so that you can actually have the surgery and the implantation on Eth. Oh, that's qu. I're now talking some serious wow Earth orbit economy. Exactly Earth orbit manufacturing, ball bearings, tissue engineering, fibiber oy. So this becomes pharmaceutical? Yes However, you know full well the rarest of rare Issues will get lost ra is the big ra rare ail hel within people. no money. The big the big ticket number sort of issues They'll be brought in and they'll brought in. It's true. And a great example of that is Merc's canancer drug, Kay Truda, It's a thirty billion dollars cancer drug. That's. 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 Kritruda 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.ight. Sos huge for patient quality of life. you don't have to go into a hospital you couldn't replicate or extrapolate that on Earth. 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 Katruda, the cancer drug, they use space to do this parameter sweep of a bunch of data that would have been really hard to get on Earth And then they You're exploring all the variables that affect an outcome. Exactly. And so you'll know what not to do, how to repeat. Exactly R. 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 Kruda on the International sppace Station.. 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. And then there's protein formulation and crystallization where maybe we get the data from space, and then we help use that to inform Eth based process. So in the future, there'll be a shelf of bio pharmace pharmaceutical products madeade in space. madeade in spaces. Look at that. We went from made in Taiwan and made in space. There is a great company called Made in Space. They got acquired a couple of years ago. they're doing three D printing, like what you were asking about. very cool And yeah, this is what we want to do with our first version of Tessaray, which is what we call the solft assembling ball. We want it to be an orbital biab with shelves and shelves and shelves of experiments that are good for life on Eth. And my mission is to design it in a way that my graduate students at MIT could go and do their own experiments up citizen scientists, well trained, but not astronauts 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. I was going to ask you that, a commonly quoted Price. Yeah It was ten thousand dollars a pound to orbit And that's dropped in the era of SpaceX with reusable boosters and things. What is it now? It's about fifteen hundred. For forgive me, I'm gonna to switch units on you. It's fifteen hundred dollars a kilogram. This is America. I know. I'm a scientist. Wow. Wow, you said it like those two things are incongruent. Damn was Patriot. It was gentous. Okay, just speak the metrics slowly. Js go. About fif five hundred dollars hundred a kilogram today. Okay. So Starship coming online. and these are not Elon's numbers. This is like independent analysis. It's expected to be two hundred dollars hundred a kilogram. Damn. which is like FedEx. That's right. That's crazy. ship something around the world Cargo humumans are little more more fragile, 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. That's very cool. can I think we skipped a step here and there's a gap in the construction because Gary asked about the seamses and that's very important because you can bring magness together. But we're talking about the vacuum of space.. So now when you have these panels, we're going to keep this Yeah, because you need You need something What hold your air press. What holds? Duck tight? S Velcro. Made in space duck tepe. Yeah. 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. Tust a quick second Isn't that a soccer ball? You read mind, yeah. That is from nineteen seventies that' the tesslation of the black and whites the black white ball. Rightack'ack and white ball. Right Now's be different, but that was the thirty two panel ball. Yeahah. exactly. that is is glorified socer ball. We're sending soccerall to space. I played soccer as a kid, mayaybe this ins me more than I realed. The only thing is I'm now'ming Do you make a gigantic space ball Or do you now daisy change a certain sizeace might care? I know's see Mill Brooks m. and just dovetailing that. As you know, we have buucky tubes, where you break the ball in the middle and you extend and you use the carbon geometry, you mimic that, I guess. That is an idea for how to maybe eventually do a B diameter ring is a bucky tube with some curve. It's a bucky innerg tube Let's try that now. bucky taus.x excuse me, let's get mathematical. It changes, it does compress the tiles on the inside, whichich wouldn't it? Ourture? It would That's the base concept that we're trying to riff on. But yeah, it's glorified soccer ball and the clamps are what keep the air pressure in. so you're gonna have force due to air pressure presshing out. Be the air pressure is pushing out. There is no other pressure out there. And so kind of light together Kind of like a It kind of like the airplane. because that's what happens in the air the fuselage. Exceptes. It's not zero pressure outside. Exactly and don't plane to atmospheric pressure Right. They drop it a little dro. Yeah ye But of course, whatever this is,es, it's nothing compared with going to the bottom of the ocean. Oh right. Interesting. Because you have twentyuch easier. thirty fifty atmospheres of pressure. is ready to crush your ass. That's.ver deep from Mariana Strch. It's thirty five thousand feet deep ty That's more than Everest. It's farther down than Everest is tall. That's relative to sea level. I'm just saying. that in space, you only have what atmosphere you to disaear. The Delta is much better much more f. good roool man. I love that. So clamps. Have you ever considered surrounding your house with a moat to keep it safe? Would you hire a professional wrestler as a bodyguard for your car? Okay, maybe you wouldn't go that far, but if you'd go to great lengths to avoid dealing with your insurance company You might have insoranoia And if you have insanoia, you should have NJM insurance They go to great lengths to do what's best for their policyholders. Start relieving your insurania today injM. com This is the life I planned This is the life I have A job, crazy schedule, kids, but I still want to better my career, getet my degree, make my kids proud At Thomas Edison State University, we know you can't pause your life to move forward. So we help you earn your degree online with flexible schedules built for real life Like yours Thomas Edison State University, the university that works for you To learn more. visit tSu. edu I'm pretty confident talking into a mic. Hey, I'm doing it right now But home projects. I second guess everything Is that noise normal Is that water damage Who do I even call That's where thumb tack comes in Just upload a photo or voice notote and it uses AI powered search to match you with the right top rated local pro. So instead of guessing eag get clarity and can hire with confidence For your next home project, try Thumb tack Hire the right proro today Hello. I'm Thankky Broke Allen And I support StarTalk on Patreon This is Star Talk with Nailed Grass Tyson There's an old saying in my field, how do you make a telescope cost one hundred times as much? Put it in space.. So we try to do everything we can on Earth's surface because the same amount of money that gives you one space telescope gives you ten or twenty Earth based telescopes. So we have we're very careful about do 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. Yes That's huge. It is huge You can build whole laboratories here on Earth for that cost. Right. So who's doing that calculation?' 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. the zero gravity flight at Yeah twenty to thirty seconds Yeah. ye. It's actually known as the vomit C. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, when I was told this, I'd had no reason to doubt it. when they filmed Apollo of thirteen with the director Ron Howard, that was. A million zillion segments of these ninety seconds bits Wow. And they do it again.. And the plane has to go up and come down and then it's stitched together as one continuous zero G scene. Exactly. I have done fourteen of those flights in my life I've never puked, my parents would disown me. Oh God. But they're amazing. This is one of the I would pu like this, by the way. This would. I have the inadequate stuff. Okay so you theadequate stuff. That's funy. But yeah, so you really I think you raised a great point, 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. Plus, in space, if you needed something to sediment, you just centrifuge it. Yes, exactly. You can always add back in the earth effects in zero Ge. So here I am thinking Who's financing this? Yes. Is it 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 you know, biotech in Lowworth Orbit is one aspect of a whole load of off world industries that just might just occur And let me put a question just ahead of that. I was active in an advisory roles in the government at the time this came up. It The space station went it rununs its course Should it be deputized as a national lab? Right, right. Because if it's a national lab We already know how to sustain national labs. We've There's Los Alamos, there's Brook Haven. Right. So we know that model. And what national labs do is the government does research that's not quite ready for the quarterly report. R For 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 cant they're not willing to go They not. That's right. And then you would apply for time on the station. and the government would supplement that. And so whatever became of that? It's funny that you mentioned that. That is what they did towards the end of the IS It did happen. IS National Lab ass has it happen. It doesn't happen. It has been pat me on the back. Yeah It's good. Do you need this re resassurance? Yeah. I was one of several people who that made complete sense in the day. 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, ten, fifteen years after that, now we are ready for commercial space. And so what NASA iss going to do to replace the interternational Space Station is truly commercial modules where these companies like AxiM 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. This would be their modular or their buckyball. This would be their tube. They're gonna to go back to a pressure cylinder. We want our buckyball to be an appendage on the Axiom sppace station or the Voyager Star Lab or the fast ace 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. So We're talking about a new financial frontier that's benefiting them not us because the old then vate enterprise Private enterpise, the biotch guys There's medine millionaires And then you don't die tomorrow. How's that? That's the trick. is 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 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 off. Although there's a lot of research What you do in space that serves other needs in space. We have a whole colony on the mooon. Yeah. and you do something in space, it might be cheaper to take it to the mooon than back to Earth. You mean to the studio Where you guys fak it. So ironically, you weret get in on the ground floor with investment, but you're out in space. Oh I see what you. Thank you very much 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 bit of technology that they want to contribute to this going forward. And looking forward in the Artemis, not even Lower Thorb, but Artemis, every next mission is trying to bring in more private space enterprise to basasically offload what NASA might have done. instead of NASA pitching tent, get someone else to pitch tent. R.stead of NASA building an orbital lunar space station get somebody else to do it. And is that going as you'd expect 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. AlsopaceX didn't care if they blew up rockets where if NASA blows up a rocketax everybody goes ick people lose their sh. Bast crap, crazy. Yeahes.. 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. Yeah, becausecause you're up against the failure is not an option from Apollo thirteen. love that. When if you're doing something that's never been done before have you has to be an option.. have to iterate. It's part of your success. Yeah, that is. So that same playbook that worked with SpaceX for the International Space Station, NASA's doing for the mooon, called Clips. Comercial 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 tension between watching NASA ced 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's and there's no money in that at. Right.er money to do that. All 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 equality and integrity of mission and things along those lines would suffer in the cutting corners by cutting corners pursuit of optimizing profit. 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. Does'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. So by the way, this has fascinating precedence. with the births of airmail So really. the government says hm This is this new fangled thing called aeroplane. and Mail was 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? att 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've 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. And just's a great metaphor. 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 take that progression, but air mail There's no US postal service airplanes. They're flying the Bllt Delta airles.actlyight. apparently right now, not getting lunch . Okay. But so that partnership is so time honored. It's not even thought about anymore.. 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 Seat pants. pe pants. Yeah I think we will eventually see sweatpants to moon. You know, we will event Oh just go in your pajamas. Oh pajamas. You go to the supermarket in your pajamas.es and your crocs and then you just go in space your crocs in space. Crocs in Spin. And more Birkenstocks girl, but yeah, we do. Okay If we're looking at Luna and we're looking at off world industry? Are we looking at data centers, taking them too the moon, arere 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 Eth. putting it we really want to because okay, maybe'm I could be wrong here because you two are the We will totally tell you you' tell me. 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. So then you would end the single biggest challenge. Right. I mean, what do how you you know, what do you do then Yeah. this is you have hit on the cracks of the tension around this idea of A 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 worldld. just like we were talking about at the beginning of the show Data centers in particular, what we think is going to have to happen is use a self assembled approach like TessRay to handle that. becausecause 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, is radiative heat transfer If you had all of your computers justust be clear. So 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. Th about.ss coonduction and convection. Right. And convection, as you said, requires gravity for the light stuff to rise. Conduction is really slow.. It's like I'm jiggling and now you're jiggling and then you're jiggling And So that's why the fireplace poker, it'll take twenty minutes for the handle to get hot,ight When the other end is in the space. That's not an efficient way to move energy Ractly. So the radiator is just, it's photons coming off the surface carrying out space. Okay, so pick it up there. 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. Wha. And so you're doing hyper localized energy harvesting and radiative transfers for an AI dataenter.rilliant. Are you able to scale that So that's vision for something like this that tessellates. It's like a honeycomb. You can finally with this architecture, make something the size of four football fields. could never pour a gamy up into a single racket So that Origami is a verb. I love that. I used to do origami, so I'm feeling it. That one just got me excited. coolgam. Do you origami? I origami. Irigami. Do we all love? So I love the idea that your tile that is the solar panel. Yes It's, I mean, to first approximation That's the energy you're going have to radiate away.actly. becausecause it's just turned into something else It becomes thermal rather than photonic. R. And so a surface the same size as the surface you're receiving the energy would be the about the rulator aboutb the right size to radiate it away. have to make sure it's not facing another surface that's trying to radiate out.. Be otherwise' l that e. They just each other other. That's all you're doing from the heat. We have spun out a company to do this My passion for my life is habitat. I really wantan to scale humans in space with these curved self. By the way, everybody MIT spawns out companies, just you know's what that's So we get taught to do. That's what they do. She just said it casually. That's a thing.ice. That's a thing. Yeah it's called I am pregnant again. another company. This one goes fortune five hundred.. 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 dataents, 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 Rndezvous Robotics does that, and then I'm going to keep the nonprofit to do future work on space stations for human spaceflight. Where does your money come from For a which piece. You're not for profit. 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. that rich people that just want to live the future. want to let I of them. I don't get any money from those two. 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 Oilli 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 They happy to support space, but they want it to support life on Earth. They want it to be off worldoring the AI data center 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 Aria. It's a little bit different than the other typical people that you think about in the space industry being Well the whole Mars thing, I mean, I'm sorry, u I've never said this publicly, but get over yourself. I mean, let's be honest here. You know, come on. You don't want to go? 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 Antarctica is warmer and wetter than Mars And no one is lining up to build in or Yeah Yeah. There's no Mars tourist b. I know. The of Mars things 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 Percial Lowell Yeah, It's him. the accus. He' a Mars fanatic. Yeah Mars. And and he wrote a book called Mars. And he wrote a book called Mars is an abode of life. Then he wrote another book called Mars and its's Canals. And everyone is thinking his life on Mars. And then HT Wells heard about this. Th then he wrote War the world withith Martians coming and sucking our brains out. So we were offered the races at that point. And' 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 to talk about Mars civilization, it's more like Mars outpost. 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 This is my favorite topic. I think AI data centers has captured a lot of people's. Itentent It's the now now a problem that really does need sol. China already has a plan to do that. They do. Yeah to think flashlight in the sky. Yeah ye Well, well no, I mean it's microwaves down. There are a bunch of US based commercial companies who are now trying to compete and beat Cha to it. So we've known since the seventies 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 And you can do a twenty four seven. You can do a twenty fourty seven. So you call a mate, you gather this energy up, you convert it into microwaves, notot trivial, but you can do it And you beam it down.ot the problem with that is it's very Austin powers. Y. It' in spi. First of all, here's the problem with that. That's called a weapon. a micrip. Yeah. Yeah ye the plane actually goes off course. Oh yeah. Zapt that stream. puff. So the company that we work with, overview Energy, is a flashlight orb. So they're doing it with IR. the amazing thing about infred Infrared. Yeah. The amazing thing about that is you can shine it on existing PVA rays on photovoltaeic cells, solar panels. so you don't have to build It's a transfer Photons to collectors here on Earth.. So put the wrong h it, still can't get through clouds. Yes. 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 waterfapor so you have to do it a sky Or you do it a place in Australia or Arizona orr desert. Any desert. And desert. lot of We got lot lot of desert in the world. Not just like a Pince Lnce from Yes where you capture. And interestingly, to connect the two topics, AI data centers and space sped solar power, this company, overview Energy that we work with, they just signed a deal with Meta met data centers. So sorry.uck ask bl a gasket once perise. Oce per episode. the over rings were a little sensive in the space industry. a gasket, not an over ring. The meta deal is gonna 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 twenty four twenty four seven. Clean energy. great to power it. And they're not microwaves. It that anything like all the satellites and space junk that's just flying around Earth Yeah, yeah, it's not microwaves. The cross section of the space station, last I checked rivals out of a football field when you include all the solar panels and the radiators and everything. You want to make something bigger than that. Yes. That makes you that much more susceptible to The flying Wlendas of Space Junk. Okay. And space junk moving eighteen thousand miles an hour and you're just this billowy sail to collect it all. It'act. So how do you square your ambitions for large space architecture with the actual state of space junk And space debr And space debris not to mention at this moment, last I checked, the fourteen thousand SaceX satellites. Right, and ever increase in count. Yes. For the really massive deployments like Starling satellites. Starling satelles. Yeahah. For the really massive deployments that rendezvous Rbotics would do our startup that's trying to do big, you know, surface area solar panels for AIata cention 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. Wow. The better answer O for that that'd be a lot of work. Clean up the debris. The much better answer How about that? Yeah. Inest in remediation. Be you've only got to get it wrong once, no, no, removing those tiles. Oh, no, no, no, no, hereere's what you do. Okay. No, you don't pop the tile and let it pass through. What good is that Let it hit the tile Th rep It'll absorb the debris. and then you just pop to new toileent.. And then you take that toileel, frisbee it back down to eararth so it burns up. and then you're good. Yeah. Okay, I the whole thing out of rubber.. It's like flub. rubber. Yeah. This is great. We'll just combine the beachhead use case with the debris remediation all in one.' pop them and pop on., but you're hoping for small sed dead. I have to tell you that that's not a bad idea for space clean up. Well, most space debris is small, right? It's like size a M.ery small thing. Yeah. ye. NASA has a it's a whole website. Yeah. R NASA tracks. There is actually great progress being made in trying to clean it up. There's ideas coming out of ESA, European sppace aggency. There's some companies trying to do Pac Man for space what that thing sounds like. Not worry about you. compomuter got you mind. Let me hear again. Let me hear again Perfect. If you can fly through a more, you know, relatively more crowded part of orrbit with some big capture area, then you can eventually amass enough mass that you will aggregate and then burn off and then burn up in the a. Oh, that's great. Yeah. So there's some serious efforts to try to remediate the debris problem and not just solve around. Oh so its self it's a self destructing Oject. You collect and then destroy. W no problemight Be as you're collecting, I don't know if it's the mk so much as it'll slow it down. It's the drag. Yeah, yeah. mask and then you're right. I should say the envelope. of this thing to get more drag from the upper edges of the app. Right exactly. Plus anything that hits it head on. it'll slows it down to It drops it to a l or. And then it's a runaay. I love it. It's a self cleaning vacuum. That's what it is. Wow. That's nice All right, so what we've discussed so far is the International Space Station with an life expectancy about four or five years from now What's the timeline for what we're discussing with you about spaceballs, space vacuums? You want to know when your company is going public. Everybody's to know. Maybe. Rondezvous, Rondevu Robotics is doing a priced seed round right now. So very early stage.o. The habitat work. How much did you need do? Yeah hon. Oh my God. The habitat company or not sorry, the habitat research within the nonprofit