Ariel Ekblaw, Principal Investigator

Dr. Ariel Ekblaw founded the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, a team of 50+ students, faculty and staff building and flying advanced technology for space exploration. Ariel leads the MIT “To the Moon to Stay Mission” and developed MIT’s “Operating in the Lunar Environment Course” that incubated and advised this first cohort of lunar surface payloads. Ariel co-teaches the course with MIT AeroAstro Professor and former astronaut, Jeffrey Hoffman. Ariel is also the founding CEO of Aurelia Institute, a hybrid space architecture research institute and venture incubation studio. Through this connected ecosystem, she strives to bring humanity’s space exploration future to life.

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 labs she leads build towards future habitats and space stations in orbit around the Earth, Moon, and Mars. Ariel is the author/editor of Into the Anthropocosmos: A Whole Space Catalog from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative (MIT Press 2021). She serves on the NASA Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) Executive Committee, guiding and shaping the coming decade of burgeoning activity on the moon. Ariel has had the rare honor and pleasure of working directly on space hardware that now operates on the surface of Mars and is leading MIT's return to the moon. 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, PRI’s Science Friday, IEEE and AIAA proceedings, and more.