Ariel Ekblaw on building beautiful architecture in space | Hacker News Reader

Ariel Ekblaw on building beautiful architecture in space

news.mit.edu

She was on the Lex Fridman podcast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW8Vjs84Fxg

Amazing interview. Makes me hopeful for the future.

As cool as this is, I think space architecture should be made of bubbles, not metal cans (even cool geodesic origami cans.)

If you look at the spittle bug's nest: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=spittlebug+nest&iax=images&... Spittle bugs create a dollop of foam and live inside it.

You make bubbles of several different sizes and nest them inside each other to make a kind of fractal spittle bug nest. The smaller bubbles serve as "vacuoles" within the larger bubbles.

I don't have the time/energy to go through the whole concept this morning but I'll summarize some of the main points: Bubbles are easy to make. The fractal structure is more resilient to damage and easy to repair. It's safer ("Yo dawg, I heard you like space stations so I put space stations in your space station!") Probably a lot cheaper, definitely lighter.

Yep. Look to Radiolaria for inspiration.

Actually if you look at Ariel Ekblaw's proposals in a different article / medium, many of her designs do involve the 'cellular'/'connected closed chambers' nature you describe. Highly recommend the Lex Fridman podcast interview linked in the other comment!

Having the ability to iterate these designs in space is going to dramatically increase the speed of refinement.

The value of private space flight to advance humans into space is extraordinary. We would be waiting endlessly for this from governments.

As for the designs, questions about seals or gravity reduction are a bit deep in the cart (before the horse) as this project is all about reducing spacewalking and arduous, manual construction. A fully assembled configuration could be filled with a 'balloon' of multiple laminated materials, pressurized and secured against the hull. That would allow for typical, proven sealing mechanisms at defined orifices. A large enough volume would allow for a rotational gravity system fully enclosed, requiring no labyrinth seals. All of these things are relatively simple compared to having an entire space station build itself.

> The final piece is the code and the sensing that’s allowing these tiles to detect their own status with their neighbors and to make decisions around whether they should be staying together or separating.

I wouldn't want my house on land to have a built in "just fall apart, lol" mechanism that can be activated by software, and I certainly wouldn't want one when floating about in space.

It seems to me that self-organisation of space habitats is putting the cart somewhat ahead of the horse when humanity only has two habitats of any kind, one is scheduled to fall to Earth within the decade and the other one is Tiangong and I don't see any imminent red carpets to other nations there any time soon.

The hard part about flat-packing walls of space habitats isn't the mechanical connections, it's the seals to hold in atmosphere. I don't see that addressed in the story.

Are linear vacuum seals like that even possible?

I wish they would look more into rotating structures to address the problems stemming from lack of gravity...

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