Ariel Ekblaw

Her parents were both pilots in the United States military, and her mother was one of the first female flight instructors; her great-grandfather was an early Arctic explorer, with geographic features named Ekblaw at both poles.⁠[1]

At Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry she studied physics and mathematics and philosophy, receiving a B.S. in 2014; as an undergraduate she got her first taste of space running an experiment on a reduced-gravity aircraft with the physics department, and she co-founded the Yale Women in Physics group.⁠[2]

Her profile also lists supersymmetry research and big-data programming at CERN, product development at Microsoft Azure, microgravity research with NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry, and Mars2020 rover hardware systems engineering at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.⁠[3]

The Space Exploration Initiative was founded in 2016 at the MIT Media Lab and is led by Ekblaw; guided by the philosophy of “democratizing access to space exploration,” it brings together scientists, engineers, artists and designers to prototype space technologies.⁠[4]

That year, in a class taught by Neri OxmanNeri OxmanNeri Oxman is an Israeli-born designer, architect and researcher who was a professor at the MIT Media Lab, founded the Mediated Matter research group and put forward the design approach she calls “Material Ecology”; after leaving MIT in 2020 she founded the design lab OXMAN in New York, where she is founder and CEO.Open the full entry, she conceived TESSERAE, in which tiles autonomously self-assemble into spherical space structures, and she began building prototypes in Neil GershenfeldNeil GershenfeldNeil Gershenfeld is a physicist and director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms whose work spans the boundary between the digital and physical worlds, from quantum computing to digital fabrication; he created the course “How To Make (Almost) Anything” and started the global fab lab network, and has been called the intellectual father of the maker movement.Open the full entry’s class MAS.863.⁠[5]

On May 2 her team launched six research projects aboard Blue OriginBlue OriginBlue Origin is a private spaceflight company founded by Jeff Bezos in 2000 and headquartered in Kent, Washington. It develops the reusable suborbital rocket New Shepard, the heavy-lift launch vehicle New Glenn, the BE-4 engine and the Blue Moon lunar lander, and is one of NASA’s lunar lander providers for the Artemis program. In 2026 it took outside investment for the first time, at a valuation of more than $130 billion.Open the full entry’s reusable New Shepard rocket, including her own PhD work, TESSERAE, programmable hexagonal and pentagonal tiles that pack flat and self-assemble in orbit into modular structures.⁠[2]

Five Space Exploration Initiative payloads launched to the International Space Station on SpaceXSpaceXSpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 whose businesses include space transportation, Starlink satellite communications and artificial intelligence. It went public in 2026 under the ticker SPCX.Open the full entry CRS-20 on March 6 for a 30-day mission inside the Nanoracks BlackBox platform; among them, seven new TESSERAE tiles tested autonomous self-assembly and docking in sustained microgravity.⁠[6]

She received an M.S. in distributed systems from the MIT Media Lab in 2017 and a PhD in 2020 with a dissertation on self-assembly for space architecture.⁠[3]

After earning her PhD in 2020, she invited Danielle DeLatte and Sana Sharma to partner with her on research, space education and policy work; the collaboration became the nonprofit Aurelia Institute, combining space technology R&D, education and outreach, and policy.⁠[5]

On November 2, 2021, the MIT Press published Into the Anthropocosmos: A Whole Space Catalog from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, a 144-page catalog she edited presenting the initiative’s space technology prototypes, experiments and habitat designs.⁠[7]

She appeared on episode 271 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast as director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, discussing swarm robotics and self-assembling space habitats, microgravity, space colonization and commercial space exploration.⁠[8]

On March 17, Axiom Space announced the research planned for its Ax-1 mission, including TESSERAE, a collaboration with the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative and Aurelia Institute, whose prototype tiles carried sensors and electro-permanent magnets to monitor the quality of bonds between tiles.⁠[9]

On flight day 9, Ax-1 commander Michael López-Alegría completed all TESSERAE operations.⁠[10]

After the mission she said the astronauts were allowed to take the tiles out of containment to free-float; the tests confirmed that tiles detected bad bonds and separated autonomously, pairs and triads of tiles assembled on their own, and a dome assembled by the astronauts held its formation.⁠[11]

In a 2022 interview she said the newly formed Aurelia Institute aims to design space station interiors around their users, as an architect would, so that people without pilot or specialist training can live in space; she argued that TESSERAE could build structures larger than a rocket fairing and so house more people.⁠[12]

As of April 2023 she planned to step back from the Space Exploration Initiative at the end of 2023 to focus on the Cambridge-based nonprofit Aurelia Institute.⁠[1]

From September 28, 2024, the 20-foot-high TESSERAE Space Habitat Pavilion designed by Aurelia Institute had its first public exhibition in the Home Beyond Earth exhibit at the Museum of FlightThe Museum of FlightThe Museum of Flight is an independent air and space museum in Seattle, Washington, founded in 1965, whose first permanent home was the Boeing Red Barn. Since 2015 it has displayed Apollo F-1 engine remains recovered by Bezos Expeditions.Open the full entry in Seattle, running until January 12, 2025, with food cultivation, cooking and shared meals in space as its theme.⁠[13]

That month, the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School named Ekblaw to its 2024–2025 cohort of fellows.⁠[14]

She was selected for the sixth cohort of Emerson CollectiveEmerson CollectiveEmerson Collective is an investment and philanthropic organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs and headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Structured as a limited liability company, it supports businesses and nonprofits through venture investments, grants and collaborative programs in education, economic mobility, immigration, the environment, health and media.Open the full entry’s Dial Fellowship, joining nine other leaders from varied fields in a year-long program on communication and storytelling.⁠[15]

In its 2024 review, Aurelia Institute said its new investment vehicle, the Aurelia Foundry Fund, had backed 13 companies; her MIT PhD patent had been granted, the institute was incubating two spinouts, Hive Robotics and Rendezvous Robotics, and a new ISS National Lab grant would support its next space station mission.⁠[16]

In September 2025 Rendezvous Robotics announced a $3 million pre-seed round led by Aurelia Foundry and 8090 Industries8090 Industries8090 Industries is an investment firm headquartered in New York that backs early- to growth-stage companies in industrial sectors including advanced manufacturing and supply chains, AI infrastructure, aerospace and defense, and energy. It was co-founded by Kerem Ozmen and Rayyan Islam, and its investors are mainly families and institutions around the world that operate major industrial enterprises; as of August 2026, it managed about $1.382 billion in assets.Open the full entry; the company had been formalized around Thanksgiving 2024, is based near Denver and planned a demonstration on the International Space Station in early 2026.⁠[17]

The company was co-founded by Ekblaw with Phil Frank and Joe Landon to commercialize the patented TESSERAE technology she invented at MIT and incubated at Aurelia Institute.⁠[18]

On an MIT Solve podcast she explained that Aurelia’s nonprofit handles early-stage R&D, zero-gravity flight education and space policy, while its venture fund both spins out internal technologies and invests in outside companies; she cited space-based solar power and in-orbit biomanufacturing as examples of space benefiting Earth.⁠[19]

As of October 2026, Aurelia Institute’s team page lists Ekblaw as co-founder and CEO and as chair of its board.⁠[20]

Aurelia Institute describes itself as a nonprofit space architecture R&D lab, education and outreach center, and policy hub, with offices in Central Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts.⁠[21]

X: Public account: https://x.com/ariel_ekblaw (opens in a new window)⁠[8]

Aurelia Institute: Official website: https://www.aureliainstitute.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Official website: https://www.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]