How the Aurelia Institute is designing a self-assembling space station

The next housing boom will happen above Earth. Replacements for an aging International Space Station (ISS) slated for a 2030 decommission, NASA’s Artemis mission returning humans to the moon and possibly Mars, and a burgeoning lunar economy are spurring teams of engineers and designers to reimagine habitats for extended living and working in space.

Most of the next-generation space stations vying to expand the ISS’s 11-person capacity and eventually replace it, feature fixed, rigid, cylindrical modules. But such architecture is expensive and dangerous because it requires multiple launches and spacewalks to assemble.

The Boston nonprofit Aurelia Institute, a space architecture R&D lab and educator, hopes to hurdle those issues with a novel approach: magnetized computerized tiles that self-assemble in orbit into changeable geodesic spheres called TESSERAE. The name is short for Tessellated Electromagnetic Space Structures for the Exploration of Reconfigurable, Adaptive Environments. A sphere maximizes the volume you can get for the surface area, while the more spacious environs would improve psychological well-being over long stays.

“I was obsessed with how we scale human presence in space,” says CEO Ariel Ekblaw, who cofounded Aurelia with chief designer Sana Sharma and Danielle DeLatte, now advisory member, while the three were at MIT. “Even if the cost dropped dramatically tomorrow, we only have room for about a dozen people in orbit. So, we need a way of doing space construction that’s faster than having to build something that can only be as big as your rocket payload fairing.”

Instead, TESSERAE’s hexagon and pentagon-shaped tiles are designed to stack flat inside the fairing, the nose cone atop the rocket. Once in space, they would gently deploy in a net or lightly inflated balloon to keep them close enough for magnets along their edges to attract one another. They can also autonomously correct misalignments. Internal sensors, magnetometers, supercapacitors, and solar battery power technology determine whether a connection is successful, and, if not, pass currents through the magnets to neutralize their charges, enabling them to detach and try again. The final structure would resemble a giant soccer ball.

“They have that intelligence built into the system, and then they can self-correct; it doesn’t require control from Earth or supervision by a human,” says Ekblaw. “The idea is that they find each other. They’re like space Legos that build themselves in orbit.”

The structure would also change as needed. Once the tiles are in place, an inflatable bladder maintains the habitat integrity, so tiles can pop on and off to replace segments, windows, docking ports, or airlocks. With multiple spheres, astronauts can move to another section and fully depressurize the one undergoing reconstruction.

“TESSERAE represents a new way of thinking about space habitat design,” notes Ekblaw on the Aurelia website. “We’re moving beyond early space stations’ confined, utilitarian spaces. Our vision is to create expandable, reconfigurable habitats that can grow with the mission needs.”

Giving the public a taste of the future

The Aurelia team—10 full-time staff and eight consultants and contractors—has already successfully tested seven hand-sized tiles in microgravity during short parabolic flights and longer stays on the ISS. Next year, it will send 32 tiles to the ISS to attempt a small-scale sphere assembly. They’re also tackling their next big challenge—how to seal and pressurize a structure that has numerous seams so it can rearrange.

“We don’t want to permanently seal the seams because we want to be able to pop tiles on and off,” she says. “So, we’re doing a lot of engineering work to overcome the challenge of all of these different seals. We have lots of different latch designs or things to reinforce those seams.”

For now, the tiles are made from a 3D-printed resin, fabricated at the Autodesk Technology Center in Boston as part of the Autodesk Research Residency Program. But full-scale 37-foot tiles will be primarily aluminum alloy. 

Down the road, they hope to continue testing on the next-generation space stations, such as those being developed by the global collective Starlab Space, the Blue Origin/Sierra Space venture Orbital Reef, and Axiom Space’s Axiom Station, whose first module is slated to launch in 2026 to attach to the ISS. Aurelia, now supported by $2 million annually in NASA grants, corporate sponsorships, and private donations, would need a partner to build a full-size operational TESSERAE in low-Earth orbit, which Ekblaw is eyeing for the next decade.  

To drum up interest, Aurelia has started giving the public a taste of this future with a traveling 20 x 24-foot mock-up with a modern interior that invites people to imagine a more hospitable life in space. After a soft unveiling in their coworking space last summer, the TESSERAE is now on view at the Seattle Museum of Flight’s Home Beyond Earth exhibit, with future displays planned for Boston and Europe next year.

Crafted by Aurelia architectural designers with input from astronauts and cosmonauts, the open interior—envisioned as a habitat commons area—offers whimsical flourishes that exploit microgravity. They include knotted nets for residents to pull themselves across the dome, a sea anemone–inspired wall couch made of inflatable tubes that hold people in place, and a multichamber window for oxygen-producing algae. The kitchen section showcases an aeroponics green wall that grows fresh produce and a panel of ISS-tested cooking elements—a Zero-G sous-vide boiler and fermentation orbs with controllable thermal plates and gas exchange to guide the fermentation process for foods like sourdough, kimchi, and miso.

If this sounds something like 2001 meets Architectural Digest, keep in mind that Aurelia’s entrée to space services comes through a creative fusion of architects, designers, and aerospace engineers—with a dash of philosophy.

Bioinspired design

Aurelia evolved from Ekblaw’s PhD thesis at MIT Media Lab, spinning out from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, a lab she founded to develop technologies that democratize access to and sustainability in space. During that time, she became fascinated with bioinspired design and self-assembly in nature—from nucleic acids forming more complex proteins to ants building a bridge—and wondered if this could apply on a macro scale.

She drew further philosophical and design inspiration from Buckminster Fuller, the late architect and futurist who improved the geodesic dome and popularized the concept of Spaceship Earth, which calls for people working together for a sustainable planet. She also looked to the experimental Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), an inflatable habitat launched in 2016 to attach to the ISS and used successfully for storage. Teaming with Sharma, then a space architecture research affiliate, and DeLatte, an aerospace engineering major, she cofounded Aurelia to apply these ideas toward a viable space habitat. Aurelia—an old English word for chrysalis—eventually incorporated in 2021, a year after Ekblaw earned her doctorate. “The name underscores the fact that we, humanity, are at the cusp of our next metamorphosis into a spacefaring species,” she says.

Some of their TESSERAE work has already led to ancillary research, such as prototype magnetic boots, which they’ve tested on Zero-G microgravity simulation flights, that could be used in the habitat on a magnetic track for resistance. Their long-term vision is to develop structures that spin to create artificial gravity.

“I’m trying to create an organization within the space industry that really values that interplay of art, science, design, and engineering, where the designers and engineers are on equal footing,” says Ekblaw. “As a nonprofit, we have a little bit more freedom and flexibility to be playful and explorative, and bring these different disciplines into aerospace, which has traditionally been a very engineering-focused field.”