Ariel Ekblaw's TESSERAE project, developed during her PhD at the MIT Media Lab, is reimagining how humanity will live and work in space.

What if the space stations of the future didn't need to be assembled by astronauts in bulky spacesuits, but instead snapped together on their own, like a mosaic assembling itself in orbit?

That's the premise behind TESSERAE (Tessellated Electromagnetic Space Structures for the Exploration of Reconfigurable, Adaptive Environments), a project developed by Ariel Ekblaw during her PhD research at the MIT Media Lab.

The concept is elegantly practical: since rockets can only carry so much, the next generation of space architecture must go modular. TESSERAE tiles, embedded with electro-permanent magnets, are packed flat for launch, then released in microgravity to quasi-stochastically self-assemble into large, geodesic structures. Think less cramped, cable-cluttered ISS corridors, or a science fiction-worthy space cathedral.

Ekblaw first conceived the idea in 2016, in MIT's 'Design Across Scales' course, inspired by a talk from Skylar Tibbits and Neil Gershenfeld's legendary "How to Make (Almost) Anything." Working with adviser Joe Paradiso, she developed and tested TESSERAE prototypes on a parabolic flight, aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard, and on the International Space Station.

The project seeded the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, which Ekblaw founded to give students across MIT access to real spaceflight opportunities. She has since launched the Aurelia Institute, an R&D nonprofit dedicated to taking TESSERAE from prototype to operational habitat — and to making the future of human spaceflight more inclusive and worthy of wonder.