Ariel Ekblaw

Architect, Engineer

Ariel Ekblaw is the founder and CEO of Aurelia Institute and GP for Aurelia Foundry Fund, where she strives to bring humanity’s space exploration future to life. Through space architecture R&D, education and outreach, and investments in new space start-ups, she is building an ecosystem to expand humanity’s horizons, democratize access to opportunities in low Earth orbit, and put space technology to work for Earth. Ariel was the founder and first Director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative (MIT SEI), a team of over 50 graduate students, staff, and faculty actively prototyping the artifacts of our sci-fi space future. Founded in 2016, the Initiative includes a portfolio of 100+ research projects focused on opening access to life in space, and supports an accelerator-like R&D program for payload development and spaceflight testing across MIT. For the Initiative, Ariel drove space-related research across science, engineering, art, and design, and led an annually recurring cadence of parabolic flights, sub-orbital launches, and missions to the International Space Station. Ariel graduated with a B.S. in Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy from Yale University and designed a novel space architecture habitat for her MIT PhD in autonomously self-assembling space structures. Her research work and the new startup lab she leads (Aurelia Institute) build towards future habitats and space stations in orbit around the Earth, Moon, and Mars. Ariel serves on the NASA Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) Executive Committee, guiding and shaping the coming decade of burgeoning activity on the moon, and is the author/editor of “Into the Anthropocosmos: A Whole Space Catalog from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative,” now available from MIT Press. Ariel has had the rare honor and pleasure of working directly on space hardware that now operates on the surface of Mars and is currently leading MIT's "To the Moon To Stay" lunar surface mission with a NASA CLPS launch provider. Ariel contributes to the XPRIZE Global Visioneering Committee, and holds an appointment as a Technology & Geopolitics Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center. She also holds an appointment as a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Radical Transformation at the Chiba Institute of Technology, Tokyo. Ariel’s work has been featured in WIRED (March 2020 cover story), MIT Technology Review, Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, CNN, NPR, in leading podcasts from Lex Fridman to Reid Hoffman, and in numerous academic journals and conference proceedings. Humanity stands on the cusp of interplanetary civilization and space is our next, grand frontier. This opportunity to design our interplanetary lives beckons to us—Ariel strives to bring our space exploration ambitions into reality in a way that also enables a better future for life on Earth.

Earthshots and moonshots—how space technology can benefit life on Earth.

Democratizing access to space

Architecture, Deep Tech, Design, Investing, Leadership, Space Exploration

Tropical plant botany!