The Future of Space Stations with Ariel Ekblaw

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22:13Neil deGrasse Tyson:Ariel. Yes. I want an answer to this. Okay. Why are you and NASA ignoring what every sci-fi writer knows? You rotate your space station. You do. So that no one has to complain about bone loss and zero G and muscle loss and rotate something so you get artificial gravity. And your ear problems, all of that. I got a five-step plan. You do? This is phase zero. Yes. Oh, well, do tell. Self-assembling first. So pack them flat in a rocket. Get that IKEA furniture. 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 can't do.

22:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:For the companies that are doing research, yes. 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. 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 deal with. What do you mean? What are you talking about? Space junk?

23:30Earth's magnetic field. Yeah. Got to consider that when we have magnets. Yeah, space junk. It's not all that strong. And then you've got to make sure you've got 100 % seal on every facet of every tile. This was the hardest question. I was going to say, yeah, that makes sense. Yes. And so the tradeoff 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.

23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson:So you'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 or a consumable air force. You're exploiting 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 self-assembly in space. You don't have the workforce issues. 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 requires some act of propulsion. Right.

24:34Neil deGrasse Tyson:And if there's already a built-in force, then you've got it. You don't need to. Then the magnets come. Okay. All right. So now step two. Let me finish what I'm talking about. Okay. You're still explaining. Sorry. Now we use the fancy word tessellate. Okay. Fine. you tessellate and what's that other word she used? I'm not telling you. You're going to build a structure that you then will set rotating. Yes. What sets it into rotation? Ah, so the initial sphere that we're talking about, the buckyball, is not going to rotate. Right. What we're working on for the artificial gravity is more of what we call like a xylem.

25:05You know those tubes and plants that go up vertically along the length of the plant stem?

25:10Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yes. We want to align a bunch of xylem. That has a word, xylem? Xylem, xylem and phloem. This is my like fourth grade memory from xylem and phloem. So this is separate from the self-assembling buckyball, 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. But something has to take on the angular momentum in the opposite direction.

25:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:So what is that going to be? So we have a bunch of balanced ballast. Okay. 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. Typical. Typical. Typical sci-fi ring. In the movie. We're sci-fi nerds. Yeah, typical sci-fi ring. So it's basically a ribbon. It's a ribbon. Yeah, yeah. And that's the. It's a secret. And then the gravity is. Yes. It's radial. 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. At your head. At your feet.

26:14At your feet. Yes. which is a lot of weird cross-coupling effects for your vestibular system. So we've changed that.

26:19Neil deGrasse Tyson:Unless the ring is really huge, and then the difference will be small. Then we're talking like, yeah, 100 kilometers. If you could pull up a ring that big, very small. And then you won't feel sick, right, because you're spinning, but you're spinning so slowly, a huge diameter. 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 foot to toe.

26:51So it's kind of like changing the geometry a little bit. Ultimately, it is a ring of cylinders that then gets spun.

26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right, so everywhere within a cylinder has the same force of gravity. That's the idea. Okay. It's at 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 there. So to be so worried about this variation from feet to head.

27:27Yes.

27:27Neil 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? 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 gene. How do you know that? We know that because of amazing studies done at MIT and elsewhere. There's some dude walking around right now who has zero balance at all. He's just falling all over the place. Mike thinks he's drunk. He's the one that she did the experiment on. Exactly. It's carnival rides.

28:01We get the Gravitron going and we play with people inside of it. Kind of true. I remember the Gravitron.

28:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's the rotating thing. Yeah, it's a centrifuge. Flying saucer, yeah. 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. That's very cool.

28:35Yeah. 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 ceiling, there's no floor. Exactly right. Okay, gotcha. 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 chambers. is kind of how we think about it.

29:06We 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 solar system. Okay, so you touched on biotech. Can't we do basically almost everything you can do in the space station here on Earth in terms of whether you have the protein folding, Alpha Fold 3? Yes, yep, Alpha Fold 3. All those aspects that gave them 90 plus percent accuracy on prediction. Alpha Fold 3 got the Nobel Prize, right? With David Baker and Demis Hassabis, their AI folding for proteins.

29:44Yeah, just one of the Nobel Prize. He has their head of IT. Protein folding. Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, it'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—

29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson:I only know one thing, can I say it? Yeah, yeah. You can make perfect ball bearings. Yes. Wow. Wow. Because the forces, like back to her sphere comment, the sphere minimizes surface area and maximizes volume. 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. You have no sedimentation, nothing sinking down. And for a lot of biological biotech processes, that's huge to get rid of sedimentation.

30:30and by the way

30:31Neil deGrasse Tyson:they took a case of wine and put it up into the space station do you have a bottle I feel like someone's got to give you a bottle of that I can neither confirm nor deny no the point was so one case went up and one stayed on earth yes and then they left it there for like the twin experiment the twin experiment the NASA twin wine there 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 I felt 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 bottle, shake it every day, and put it back in.

31:13Like it's going to make it terrible.

31:16Neil deGrasse Tyson:You're simulating the one in space. You just shake everything all the time. Dr. Tyson, here's the wine. I can't believe you bring this to me. Your wine is absolute swill. You don't insult me. Keep going down the list. Yeah, so what can you do? So you don't have any convection. You don't have sedimentation. 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.

31:53And a wonderful example is this company, LambdaVision, 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. Is this Lasix? It's not Lasix. No, it's not Lasix. Yeah, it's a different process. It's bacteria, dobsin, print.

32:14Neil deGrasse Tyson:No, that's why I asked. Yeah. Yeah, so it's making... Lasix 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 Earth so that you can actually have the surgery and the implantation on Earth. Yo, that's crazy. We are now talking some serious low Earth orbit economy. Exactly. Low Earth orbit manufacturing, ball bearings, tissue engineering, fiber optic cable. So this becomes pharmaceutical.

32:49Yes. However, you know full well, the rarest of rare issues will get lost. Whereas the big...

32:56Neil deGrasse Tyson:The real rare ailments within people. There's no money in it. So the big ticket number sort of issues, they'll be brought in. They'll be brought in. It's true. And a great example of that is Merck's cancer drug, Keytruda. It's a$30 billion cancer drug. That's right. 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. So huge for patient quality of life.

33:32You don't have to go into a hospital to get Keytruda. 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 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.

33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:You're exploring all the variables that affect an outcome. Exactly. And so you'll know what not to do, how to repeat. 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. No. 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.

34:24And 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.

34:32Neil deGrasse Tyson:So in the future, there'll be a shelf of biopharmaceutical products made in space. Made in space. Spice labs. Look at that. Made in space. We went from made in Taiwan to made in space. There is a great company called Made in Space. They got acquired a couple years ago. They're doing 3D printing like what you were asking about. Oh, very cool. And yeah, this is what we want to do with our first version of Tesserae, 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.

35:10Up there. As 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 next decade. I was going to ask you that. A commonly quoted price is$10 ,000 a pound to orbit.

35:27Neil deGrasse Tyson:Reload below. And that's dropped in the era of SpaceX with the reusable boosters and things. What is it now? It's about$1 ,500. Forgive me, I'm going to switch units on you. It's$1 ,500 a kilogram. This is America. I know, I'm a scientist. Wow. Wow, you said it like those two things are incongruent. Damn. I'm a very patriotic scientist. Okay, just speak the metric slowly. Yes, go. About$1 ,500 a kilogram today. With Starship coming online, and these are not Elon's numbers. This is like independent analysis. It's expected to be$200 a kilogram. Damn. Which is like FedEx. That's right. That's crazy.

36:07If you can ship something around the world, cargo. Humans are a little 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. You know what? Can we, because I think we skipped a step here. And there's a gap in the construction. Because Gary asked about the seams. Yes. And that's very important. Because you can bring magnets together. Sure. But we're talking about the vacuum of space. We are. So now, when you have these panels, what's going to keep this?

36:39Yeah, because you need something to keep it. Air pressure. What holds it? Duck tape. Seals. Velcro. Made in space, duct tape. Yeah, we prefer velcro. Okay. No, we do clamps. So, between all of the seams of this tessellated buckyball that's made out of hexagons and pentagons, those are the tiles that come together with the magnets. Just a quick second. Isn't that a soccer ball? You read my mind. Yes. From 1970s, that was the tessellation of the black and white. That's the black and white ball. Right, that's the black and white ball. Now it's very different, but that was the 32-paneled ball. Exactly.

37:15It is a glorified soccer ball. We're sending a soccer ball to space. I played soccer as a kid. Maybe this influenced me more than I realized. The only thing is, now I'm thinking, do you make a gigantic space ball, or do you now daisy-change a certain size? Every time you say space ball, I can't help. I know.

37:29Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's email Brooks in your mind. And, just dovetailing that, as you know, we have Bucky tubes, where you break the ball in the middle and you extend it. And you expand it. When you use the carbon geometry, you mimic that, I guess. That is an idea for how to maybe eventually do a big diameter ring. It's a Bucky tube with some curvature. Oh, it's a Bucky inner tube. It's a Bucky Taurus. You better try to mark that now. Bucky Taurus, excuse me. Let's get mathematical on it. It changes. It does compress the tiles on the inside. Oh, it would, wouldn't it? Because you get that curvature. It would. That's the base concept that we're trying to riff on.

38:03But yeah, it's a glorified soccer ball, and the clamps are what keep the air pressure in. So you're going to have force due to air pressure pushing out. Because air pressure's pushing out. There is no other pressure out there. Yeah. And so everything kind of like the airplane, because that's what happens in the fuselage.

38:19Neil deGrasse Tyson:Except it's not zero pressure outside. And they don't pump the plane to atmospheric pressure. Right. They drop it a little. They drop it. Yeah. But, of course, whatever this is, it's nothing compared with going to the bottom of the ocean. Oh, right. Interesting. Because you have 10, 20, 30, 50 atmospheres. Atmospheres of pressure is ready to crush your ass. That's right. Whatever is your vessel. How deep is the Marianas Trench? It's 35 ,000 feet deep. That's more than Everest. It's farther down than Everest is tall. Relative to sea level. I'm just saying that in space, you only have one atmosphere.

38:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:One atmosphere. That's all you need. The delta is much better, much more favorable. Wow, that's cool, man. I love that. So clamps.

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42:16Neil 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 because 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... Really justify. We have to completely justify what we're doing in space. Gotcha. And so the cost of getting the experiment up there, doing the experiment, and bringing it back, that's huge. It is huge. You can build whole laboratories here on Earth for that cost. Right. So who's doing that calculation?

42:56So 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.

43:16Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, the zero-gravity flight is at most— Yeah, 20 to 30 seconds. Affectionately known as the vomit comet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, 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. 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 14 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 precursor ways.

43:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:I'm the inadequate stuff. The inadequate stuff? That's funny. I think you raise a great point. You want to only use space when you really have to be up there. 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. You do a really long-scale experiment like tissue engineering that's going to be economically viable to do in space. 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-G.

44:31So here I am thinking, who's financing this? Yes. 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, you know, biotech in low-Earth orbit is one aspect of a whole load of off-world industries that might just occur.

44:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:And let me put a question just ahead of that. 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? Right, right. 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. Right. So we know that model. Yeah. And what national labs do is the government does research that's not quite ready for the quarterly report. Right. Okay. 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 capitalists, corporate folks.

45:43Neil deGrasse Tyson:They're not willing to go down. That's right. And then you would apply for time on the station. Yes. And the government would supplement that. Right. And so whatever became of that. It's funny that you mention that. That is what they did towards the end of the ISS. It did happen. ISS National Lab, ISS NL. That's how it happened. It did happen. And it has been. Pat me on the back. It's good advice. Do you need this resource? Yeah. I was one of several people 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.

46:23Now I think we're 10, 15 years after that. Now we are ready for commercial space. And so what NASA's going to do to replace the International Space Station is truly commercial modules where these companies like Axiom 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. And this would be their module or their buckyball. This would be their tube. They're going to go back to a pressure We want our buckyball to be an appendage on the Axiom space station or the Voyager Star Lab or the Vast space station.

46:59So 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. Benefiting who's them? The finance guys. Private enterprise. Private enterprise, the biotech guys. No, there's a medicine at the end. They become billionaires, but then you don't die tomorrow. How's that? That's the trick. 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?

47:32It'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.

47:40Neil 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. 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. So ironically, you want to get in on the ground floor with investment, but you're out in space. Oh, I see what you did there. Thank you very much. So it appears I haven't been able to keep up with all these space startups. And it seems that they each have a niche bit of technology that they want to contribute. Right. to this going forward.

48:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:And looking forward in the Artemis, not even low Earth orbit, Artemis, every next mission is trying to bring in more private space enterprise to basically offload what NASA might have done. Instead of NASA pitching tent, get someone else to pitch tent. Instead 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.

49:00Also, the SpaceX didn't care if they blew up rockets, whereas NASA blows up a rocket, everybody goes freaking bats crap crazy. Yes. They were able to build 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.

49:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, because you're up against the failure is not an option ethos from Apollo 13. Love that guy. If you're doing something that's never been done before, failure has to be an option. You have to iterate. It's part of your success. Yeah, that is. 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 tension between watching NASA seed some of these activities to private enterprise.

49:56But 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 free that. And there's no money in that at all. Right. There's no money in that to that. 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 in the pursuit— By cutting corners.

50:33By 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.

51:08It 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.

51:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:So, by the way, this has fascinating precedence with the birth of airmail. Really? So the government says, hmm, there's this newfangled 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'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.

51:55Neil deGrasse Tyson:And just, 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 a progression, but it makes sense. There's no U.S. Postal Service airplanes. No. They're flying in the belly of Delta Airlines. Exactly. And apparently right now I'm not getting lunch, but... Yeah. Okay. But so that partnership is so time honored, it's not even thought about anymore. In that context. 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.

52:31It went from you dress up to go into first class and it was a luxury thing to now. Sweatpants. To sweatpants. Yeah, don't worry. I think we will eventually see sweatpants to moon. You know, we will eventually see. Oh, God forbid. Oh, pajamas. Like you go to the supermarket in your pajamas. Yes. And your Crocs. And then you go up to the lunar holiday. Crocs in space. Crocs in space. I'm more Birkenstocks girl, but yeah, we do. We can take Crocs in space. 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?

53:07And that becomes a very different scenario, and we're taking away an issue here on the surface of Earth. Right, right. We're putting it up. We really want to, because, okay, maybe I'm, I could be wrong here, because you two are the scientists. We will totally tell you if you're wrong. And you will 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. It's the single biggest challenge.

53:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right. What do you do then? Yeah. 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 Tesserae 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, is radiative heat transfer.

54:16If you had all of your compute.

54:18Neil 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. 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 now you're jiggling. 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 side. That's not an efficient way to move energy. So the radiant is just, it's photons coming off the surface, carrying it out into space.

54:57Neil deGrasse Tyson: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. Whoa. And so you're doing hyper-localized energy harvesting and radiative heat transfer for an AI data center. Brilliant. Are you able to scale that? So that's the 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 that you could never origami up into a single rocket.

55:37So that's what we're trying to unlock. Origami is a verb.

55:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:I love that. I used to do origami, so I'm feeling it. That one just got me excited. That's really cool. Do you origami? I origami. I origami. Do we all learn? So I love the idea that your tile, that is the solar panel. Yes. I mean, to first approximation, that's the energy you're going to have to radiate away. Exactly. because it's just turned into something else. It becomes thermal rather than photonic. And so a surface the same size as the surface you're receiving the energy would be 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 it out.

56:20Neil deGrasse Tyson:Because otherwise they just heat each other at that point. That's all you're doing is transferring the heat. So we have spun out a company to do this. So my passion for my life is Habitat. I really want to scale humans in space with these curved self-assessment structures. By the way, everybody at MIT spawns out companies, just so you know. That's what they do. That's what they do. She just said it casually. That's a thing. Nice. That's good. That's a thing. Sweetie, I'm pregnant again. Oh, dear. Got another company idea. This one goes Fortune 500. So we spun out Rendezvous Robotics. They're going to focus on what we call the beachhead market, 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.

57:11So Rendezvous Robotics does that. And then I'm going to keep the nonprofit to do future work on space stations for human spaceflight.

57:19Neil deGrasse Tyson:And where does your money come from? For which piece? Your 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. So rich people that just want to live the future. All two of them. Or that they want to let— Both 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 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.

58:01So 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 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 Aurelia. It's a little bit different than the other typical people that you think about in the space industry 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 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.

58:37Neil deGrasse Tyson:Antarctica is warmer and wetter than Mars, and no one is lining up to build condos in Antarctica. There's no Mars tourist board. 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. It's Percival Lowell. Yeah. It's him. And the canals on Mars. 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.

59:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:And then H.G. Wells heard about this. Then he wrote War of the Worlds with Martians coming and sucking our brains out. So we were off at the races at that point. 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. 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 universal?

59:56This is my favorite topic. I think AI data centers has captured a lot of people's attention recently. It's the now. It's the now. But I think a problem that really does need solar energy is… China already has a plan to do that. They do. China has a plan to do that. A big flashlight in the sky. Yeah, yeah.

1:00:09Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, no, it's microwaves to be down. There are a bunch of U.S.-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. And you can do it 24-7. 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. But the problem with that is it's very Austin Powers.

1:00:41Yeah, it's in spikes. First of all, here's the problem with that. That's called a weapon. Especially as a microwave.

1:00:48Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, the plane actually goes off course. Oh, yeah. Zap. Don't cross that screen. Puff them. 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, 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 Oh, it's a transfer of photons to collectors here on Earth. Wait, hold on. You still can't get through clouds. 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 Earth to get this approved.

1:01:31But then 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. Any desert. A lot of desert. We got a lot of desert. A lot of desert in the world. Then again, you've got the logistical transference from where you capture. 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 Oh, God damn! Data centers.

1:02:01Neil deGrasse Tyson:So sorry. Chuck has to blow a gasket once per episode. Not the O-rings. We're a little sensitive in the space industry. 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. So they're not microwaves. That's going to zap anything like all the satellites and space junk that's just flying around Earth. Yeah, it's not microwaves.

1:02:37Neil 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. Yes. That makes you that much more susceptible to the flying Walendas of space junk. Damn. Okay? And space junk moving 18 ,000 miles an hour. And you're just this billowy sail to collect it all, it seems. Big, massive. So how do you square your ambitions for large space architecture with the actual state of space junk? And space debris. And space debris, and not to mention, at this moment, last I checked, the 14 ,000 SpaceX satellites.

1:03:21Right, and ever increasing count.

1:03:23Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yes. For the really massive deployments like those— Starlink, the Starlink satellites. Starlink satellites, yeah. For the really massive deployments that Rendezvous Robotics would do, our startup that's trying to do big 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 clean up the debris. The much better answer is invest in remediation.

1:03:56Because you've only got to get it wrong once. doing exactly.

1:03:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:Moving those tiles. Oh, no, no. No, no. Here'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. And then repair it. Then it'll absorb the debris and then you just pop a new tile in. Pop a new tile in. And then you take that tile and frisbee it back down to earth so it burns up and then you're good. Yeah. Okay, I saw that problem. Or make the whole thing out of rubber. Yes. Like flubber. Like flubber. This is great. We'll just combine the beachhead use case with the debris remediation all in one. There you go. Then pop them on, pop them on.

1:04:28No, but you're hoping for small size debris. I have to tell you, that's not a bad idea for space cleanup.

1:04:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, most space debris is small. It's the size of marble. It's very small. NASA has a whole website that NASA tracks. 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. I don't remember what that thing sounds like. Not worry about you. What computer game mode? Let me hear it again. Let me hear it again. Stop. Perfect. Stop. If you can fly through a 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.

1:05:19And then burn up in the atmosphere. Oh, that's great. Yeah. So there's some serious efforts to try to remediate the debris problem and not just solve around it.

1:05:26Neil deGrasse Tyson:Oh, so it's a self-destructing object. So you collect and then destroy with no problem. Right, because as you're collecting, I don't know if it's the mass so much as it'll slow it down. It's the drag, yeah. The mass and then, you're right, I should say the envelope of this thing to get more drag from the upper edges of the atmosphere. Right, exactly. Plus anything that hits it head on, it'll slow it down. Slows it down too. Drops it to a lower orbit. And then it's a runaway. 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 a life expectancy about four or five years from now.

1:06:07What's the timeline for what we're discussing with you about space balls, space vacuums? He wants to know when your company's going public.

1:06:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's what he wants to know. Maybe. Rendezvous Robotics is doing a priced seed round right now, so a very early stage company. the Habitat work how much do you need? we'd be honored oh my god the Habitat company or not sorry the Habitat research within the non-profit 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.

1:06:54Where there's a will, there's a way, and there is a will to make that happen. There's a will to make that happen. Where there's geopolitics, 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.

1:07:27Rendezvous Robotics, for the beachhead market stuff, they have to show that they can do customer traction in 2027, 2028, 2029. They don't get to have the pleasure that I have of doing longer term research. They have to really get commercial customers. Have you had any low earth trials, low earth orbit trials? Yes. And the success of? 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 Rendezvous Robotics, our company, is going to do the first ever in LEO, low-Earth 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 length, next year in 2027.

1:08:13Neil deGrasse Tyson:I've got a physics question. Yes. To bring tiles together, aren't they kind of attached to each other on launch? and you have to separate them in order to reassemble them in a different way? 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. It's 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.

1:08:48They'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. Trying to find each other. 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. There's a kid's toy. I think it's called Connectix. To sponsor it. Yes, or Lego. I think it's called Connectix, which are, they're like I played with those. Magnet Legos.

1:09:22Magnetiles. Magnetiles.

1:09:23Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, they're segments and they're balls so that the segment has a concave surface that can attach onto a ball so that the angle can be anything. You can make all of the polyhedra with it. Yeah, connects. Because my wife is a physicist. Yeah. We wanted to make sure that all of their toys were probes of laws of physics. Oh, I love that. And so this magnetic connection kit. Yeah. It's very cool. I've been told that my generation was Lego, so I always say Legos with magnets, but apparently magnet tiles are the new thing for kids now, which are basically flat panels with magnets on their edges. So I wish I had come up with that toy.

1:10:01I was as well. I kind of did, but for the whole world. For the whole world.

1:10:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, we have to have you back. You live now in New York City. I live now in New York City. Well, welcome to my office here at the Hayden Planetarium. And you came when you were a kid? 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. In the planetarium or under the whale? 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. I was director. Wow. Yeah. Coming here was like a salmon swimming upstream.

1:10:38Came back. Coming back home. Where it all began. Where it all began. So it's an honor, Neil. Thank you.

1:10:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah. We will totally have to get you back. Yeah. And tell us where to put money. Real. How far along are we? How's that baby coming? What trimester are you in? What trimester are you in? Where's the due date on the baby? Chuck, I will keep you posted, I promise. All right. So this has been another installment of StarTalk Special Edition. This one felt extra special, though. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right, again, Ariel, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. For being on StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.

1:11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson:The wrongs, we must right. The fights, we must win. the future we must secure together for our nation. This is what's in front of us. This determines what's next for all of us. We are Marines. We were made for this.

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