By Amy Gunia, Tom Page

Humans have grand plans for residing in space, from a new space station under development to a planned base on the moon. Some even hope that one day people can live on Mars. There’s work underway to figure out how to build habitats to support those ambitions.

One of the innovations being tested is TESSERAE: magnetic, self-assembling tiles. Invented by Ariel Ekblaw while pursuing her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the tiles can be stacked on top of each other inside a rocket and released in space, where they can autonomously attach to each other — employing electro-permanent magnets, cameras and AI — to create a predetermined shape.

Once they’re latched together, the structure can be pressurized, allowing humans to live inside.

“They can self-assemble into something way bigger than the size of the rocket that they came up in,” said Ekblaw, who is now the founder and CEO of Aurelia Institute, a nonprofit space architecture research and development lab that has further refined the tiles.

That could allow humans to build “science-fiction-worthy, big, grand structures” in space, she added.