Ariel Ekblaw speaks at Semafor World Economy Summit
Aurelia’s CEO spoke about the new space economy and scaling ambition through public-private partnerships
At Semafor’s World Economy Summit on April 25, CEO Ariel Ekblaw joined the “AI and the Next Tech Revolution” session to discuss the thriving commercial space economy and what’s on the horizon for research, funding, and innovation in space.
In an interview with Semafor’s Rohan Goswami, Ekblaw described the massive decrease in the cost of sending payloads to space over the past decade: “It was over $50,000 per kilogram in the NASA Space Shuttle era; now it’s anticipated to be below $200 per kilogram with SpaceX Starship coming online. That’s remarkable. That’s like FedEx — if you can ship something around the world, you can ship it to space.”
What’s needed now, Ekblaw says, is infrastructure to scale our ambitions. “How can we build large-scale infrastructure in orbit for the public good?” She went on to share the example of a gigawatt-scale solar power array in orbit as the kind of grand-scale project that’s becoming technologically possible, but that a single company or VC venture is unlikely to achieve on its own. ”We now want to see a public-private partnership model, akin to how NASA’s COTS approach transformed ISS missions, for this kind of next-gen infrastructure.”
Watch Ekblaw’s full conversation with Goswami in the video below (starting at 1:26:05), and sign up for our mailing list to get first-look updates on what’s coming next!