The line between science fact and science fiction is often now blurred, and nowhere is that more evident in the way our computing is changing. However throughout the last decade we’ve seen the line blurred in other places and the landing of a rocket on its tail, followed by the flight of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy with its ballet landing of its side boosters, alongside the race to win the smallsat launcher war, and a serious push to make cubesats more useful and open source, means that space is now one of those places.
Over the last couple of years we’ve seen a Raspberry Pi on the space station, plans to 3D print a satellite, and hardware sent to the space station via a single email. Now Ariel Ekblaw — a student at MIT’s Media Lab and founder and lead of the Space Exploration Initiative at the lab — is looking to biology for inspiration.