Dean Regis here, astronomer and host of Looking Up.

I journey to the far reaches of the universe, hearing from scientists, astronauts, and geeky celebs along the way.

We cover everything from black holes to the latest in science fiction.

Listen now to the Looking Up podcast from the NPR Network and Cincinnati Public Radio.

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From NPR.

More than 60 years ago, the Soviet Union successfully launched the first man into space.

Today, the number of people who've been to space is in the hundreds.

Still, that's a far cry from widespread space

travel. I have been obsessed with the science fiction idea of humans living in space for a long time.

Ariel Ekblah got her PhD in aerospace structure and design, a crucial step towards her dream

of shifting space life from sci-fi to reality.

Nowadays, I go by space architect, thinking about the future of infrastructure in orbit.

Step two, Ariel founded the company Aurelia with two other women, Danielle DeLotte and Sana Sharma,

to get more people to space more often and for longer periods of time.

She says the challenge now is building

in space. The bottleneck isn't rockets anymore. It's real estate. It's trying to get bigger volumes

of space stations of orbit. Her solution? The equivalent of magnetic Legos in space called

Tesserae, structures that would self-assemble into large, livable structures in orbit.

And Ariel says, the reason she's so excited for more humans to live in space isn't to

escape the Earth. I love Earth. Earth is the best home we'll ever have. One of the things we're

most excited for in the space context is can we off-world heavy industry? Don't off-world the humans.

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