More people are traveling to space, but the International Space Station can only hold 11 people at a time. Aurelia Institute, a nonprofit space architecture lab based in Cambridge, MA, has an approach that may help: a habitat that can be launched in compact stacks of flat tiles and self-assemble in orbit.
Building large space habitats is difficult. Structural components, like walls, have to fit on a rocket. There’s often not enough room to launch everything in one go. It takes multiple launches to build larger structures, like the ISS, adding to the expense. Once all the components have made it to space, habitats must be constructed by humans, and that’s dangerous work.
“If you rely on a human to help you assemble something, they have to put on an extravehicular suit,” says Aurelia Institute CEO Ariel Ekblaw. “It's risking their life. We'd love to have this done more safely in the future."
At a co-working space in Roslindale, MA, in early August, Aurelia Institute showed off a mock-up of a space habitat called TESSERAE, which is short for Tessellated Electromagnetic Space Structures for the Exploration of Reconfigurable, Adaptive Environments. The structure looks like a futuristic, one-story-tall soccer ball. The team described how the station’s tiles, each about six-feet tall and wide, would come together.
The idea is to make the structure as compact as possible for launch. “Right now, anything that goes up is in the very rigid structure of the payload [fairing], which is what sits on top of the rocket,” says Stephanie Sjoblom, Aurelia Institute’s vice president of strategy and business development. “With this technology, we’re creating tiles that we stack kind of like a flat-packed IKEA box.”
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