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  • This futuristic space habitat is designed to self-assemble in orbit

    This futuristic space habitat is designed to self-assemble in orbit

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    There’s another way to make something compact for launch: inflate it in orbit. NASA has already done this—its experimental BEAM habitat, which is connected to the ISS, launched in 2016 and has stored cargo. Sierra Space wants to make inflatable habitats as large as a three-story building, although they’ve yet to test these designs in space. 

    Ekblaw sees the TESSERAE habitat and inflatables as complementary technologies. TESSERAE’s hard outer shell should better protect astronauts from space debris, such as micrometeoroids. And the TESSERAE habitat is more easily repaired than an inflatable, she says, because tiles can simply be switched out. That’s not true for inflatables, where a tear may mean a complicated patch job or replacing the entire habitat. “I’m very pro-inflatables,” Ekblaw says. “I think the answer should be both, not either.” 

     Design challenges

    The Aurelia Institute envisions that, once constructed, the TESSERAE habitat will be quite different from what we usually see at the ISS: not just functional, but also fun, accessible, and comfortable.  

    The design contains whimsical elements informed by hundreds of interviews with astronauts. One looks like a massive inflatable sea anemone that sticks out of the wall. But it’s actually a couch—lying down in space isn’t easy, so astronauts could, theoretically, wedge themselves between inflatable branches and get cozy. 

    Scaling up the technology will be difficult, though. Oliver Jia-Richards, an aerospace engineer at University of Michigan, isn’t sure whether Aurelia’s combination of magnets and sensors will be enough to get larger tiles to self-assemble. Moving things in space with precision typically requires a propulsion system. “If they accomplished this, it would be a breakthrough in terms of how we do this,” says Jia-Richards. Ekblaw says she’s not ruling out the need for propulsion.  

    The structures the tiles can currently create are also not airtight, and therefore not human-ready, Ekblaw notes. Her team may add latches at the edges of the tiles, which would knit them together more closely. Another idea is to inflate an airtight balloon in the middle of the space for people to live within. In that case, the tiles would become simply an exoskeleton to an interior, pressurized bladder. 

    The team just got approved by NASA to send more small tiles up to the ISS next year. This time, they’ll send up about 32 (rather than just five) and see if they can build an entire spherical structure on a small scale. 

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  • NASA Confirms Where the Space Junk That Hit a Florida House Came From

    NASA Confirms Where the Space Junk That Hit a Florida House Came From

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    NASA has confirmed that the object that fell into a Florida home last month was part of a battery pack released from the International Space Station.

    This extraordinary incident opens a new frontier in space law. NASA, the homeowner, and attorneys are navigating little-used legal codes and intergovernmental agreements to determine who should pay for the damages.

    Alejandro Otero, owner of the Naples, Florida, home struck by the debris, told Ars he is fairly certain the object came from the space station, even before NASA’s confirmation. The circumstances strongly suggested that was the case. The cylindrical piece of metal tore through his roof on March 8, a few minutes after the time US Space Command reported the reentry of a space station cargo pallet and nine decommissioned batteries over the Gulf of Mexico on a trajectory heading forward the coast of southwest Florida.

    On Monday, NASA confirmed the object’s origin after retrieving it from Otero. The agency said in a statement that the object is made of the metal alloy Inconel, weighs 1.6 pounds, and is 4 inches in height and 1.6 inches in diameter.

    “As part of the analysis, NASA completed an assessment of the object’s dimensions and features compared to the released hardware and performed a materials analysis,” the agency said. “Based on the examination, the agency determined the debris to be a stanchion from the NASA flight support equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet.”

    A Jolt From the sky

    Otero was out of the country when his house came under the crosshairs, but his 19-year-old son was home. The impact sounded like fireworks going off, Otero said in an interview Tuesday. A recording from Otero’s Nest camera captured the noise.

    The son “was sitting in front of his computer doing homework with his earphones listening to music, and he was jolted out of his chair with a very loud sound,” Otero said.

    After surveying the damage when he got home, Otero filed a police report, and first responders helped pull the object out of the subfloor between the first and second stories of his house. It penetrated the roof and ceiling of an unoccupied second-floor bedroom, then hit the floor between the bed and a bathroom and struck a piece of air conditioning ductwork. It hit so hard that it created a bump on the ceiling of the first floor but didn’t penetrate it, according to Otero.

    Something the size and mass of this battery support stanchion would have probably struck the house with a terminal velocity of more than 200 mph (320 km per hour). At that speed, the results could have been deadly.

    “Luckily, nobody got hurt,” Otero said.

    A quick glance at the object indicated to Otero that it probably came from space. “It’s super dense, a very strong alloy, a very interesting metal,” he said. “When I saw that it was half-charred and that it had a cylindrical shape that had taken a concave shape from traveling through the atmosphere, I knew it had to be coming from outer space.

    “I knew it was manmade,” Otero continued. “I just didn’t know where it was from until I started googling.”

    Otero said he found Ars’ original article on the reentry on March 8, along with posts about the event on X. That’s when he contacted a local news outlet. WINK News, the CBS affiliate for southwest Florida, was first to report on the damage to Otero’s home. After Otero tried several times to contact NASA officials, an attorney from Kennedy Space Center called him to hear his story. NASA then dispatched someone to pick up the object from Naples.

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  • International Space Station Trash May Have Hit This Florida House

    International Space Station Trash May Have Hit This Florida House

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    A few weeks ago, something from the heavens came crashing through the roof of Alejandro Otero’s home, and NASA is on the case.

    In all likelihood, this nearly 2-pound object came from the International Space Station. Otero said it tore through the roof and both floors of his two-story house in Naples, Florida.

    Otero wasn’t home at the time, but his son was there. A Nest home security camera captured the sound of the crash at 2:34 pm local time (19:34 UTC) on March 8. That’s an important piece of information because it is a close match for the time—2:29 pm EST (19:29 UTC)—that US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris from the space station. At that time, the object was on a path over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward southwest Florida.

    This space junk consisted of depleted batteries from the ISS, attached to a cargo pallet that was originally supposed to come back to Earth in a controlled manner. But a series of delays meant this cargo pallet missed its ride back to Earth, so NASA jettisoned the batteries from the space station in 2021 to head for an unguided reentry.

    Otero’s likely encounter with space debris was first reported by WINK News, the CBS affiliate for southwest Florida. Since then, NASA has recovered the debris from the homeowner, according to Josh Finch, an agency spokesperson.

    Engineers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center will analyze the object “as soon as possible to determine its origin,” Finch told Ars. “More information will be available once the analysis is complete.”

    Ars reported on this reentry when it happened on March 8, noting that most of the material from the batteries and the cargo carrier would have likely burned up as they plunged through the atmosphere. Temperatures would have reached several thousand degrees, vaporizing most of the material before it could reach the ground.

    The entire pallet, including the nine disused batteries from the space station’s power system, had a mass of more than 2.6 metric tons (5,800 pounds), according to NASA. Size-wise, it was about twice as tall as a standard kitchen refrigerator. It’s important to note that objects of this mass, or larger, regularly fall to Earth on guided trajectories, but they’re usually failed satellites or spent rocket stages left in orbit after completing their missions.

    In a post on X, Otero said he is waiting for communication from “the responsible agencies” to resolve the cost of damages to his home.

    If the object is owned by NASA, Otero or his insurance company could make a claim against the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, according to Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi.

    “It gets more interesting if this material is discovered to be not originally from the United States,” she told Ars. “If it is a human-made space object which was launched into space by another country, which caused damage on Earth, that country would be absolutely liable to the homeowner for the damage caused.”

    This could be an issue in this case. The batteries were owned by NASA, but they were attached to a pallet structure launched by Japan’s space agency.

    How This Happened

    At the time of the March 8 reentry, a NASA spokesperson at the Johnson Space Center in Houston said the space agency “conducted a thorough debris analysis assessment on the pallet and has determined it will harmlessly reenter the Earth’s atmosphere.” This was, by far, the most massive object ever tossed overboard from the International Space Station. “We do not expect any portion to have survived reentry,” NASA said.

    Research from other space experts, however, did not match NASA’s statement. The Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center, says a “general rule of thumb” is that 20 to 40 percent of the mass of a large object will reach the ground. The exact percentage depends on the design of the object, but these nickel-hydrogen batteries were made of metals with relatively high density.

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