TESSERAE: self-assembling habitat tiles

What TESSERAE is

TESSERAE (Tessellated Electromagnetic Space Structures for the Exploration of Reconfigurable, Adaptive Environments) is a tessellated shell whose multifunctional tiles self-assemble autonomously in orbit : flexible, reconfigurable modules rather than one monolithic habitat.

What we designed

The brief was severe: support up to eight astronauts on three-month missions, with everything passing through a 93 cm airlock. The interior work covered a centralized habitation core with private quarters and projection surfaces; a hexagonally tessellated galley in collapsible fabric that deploys from a quarter of its final volume; an anthropometric sleeping bag using pneumatic morphing to support the body in zero-g; a meditation corridor with tactile walls and a window view; and reconfigurable life-support and storage racks adapted from JPL designs. The through-line was habitability : designing a small volume a crew would actually want to stay in for months.

What TESSERAE became

Our focus throughout was maturing the human-habitability side of the technology : making the interior something a crew could actually live in as the structure itself advanced. TESSERAE's self-assembling structures went on to be commercialized by Rendezvous Robotics, and the broader program became one of the founding projects of the Aurelia Institute, the nonprofit that spun out of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative under Ariel Ekblaw. The tiles have since flown on suborbital and ISS test missions.

Anastasia did this work as a visiting researcher at MIT Media Lab's Space Exploration Initiative. There was no formal Stellar Amenities collaboration : she was invited to bring her human-factors expertise to the interior architecture of TESSERAE, working on-site alongside Ariel Ekblaw.

A shell and an interior

Ariel Ekblaw invented the smart modular tiles that join themselves together in space with magnets and form a many-sided station. What the engineers built was the outer shell.

She invited Anastasia to the MIT Media Lab as a visiting space architect. In three weeks Anastasia designed the interior layout of that station for a crew of eight, drawing on Japanese Metabolism to make the interior transformable and flexible.

Their joint paper, with Ariel Ekblaw as lead author and Anastasia as a key co-author, received the top academic award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2020.

A growth theory for space architecture

The paper argues that space architecture has been held back by the infeasibility of deploying and maintaining cost-sink behemoths, structures so large and so singular that one change of administration can end them. The alternative is to start small and grow: a fully formed tree does not burst out of the ground, and its final shape is not known at the seed stage.

Three principles frame that growth. Accretion over construction: begin with minimum viable units and let them assemble, like mussels accreting to a pier. Seeding over erecting: use fractal self-similarity so a single base unit can replicate and bond into ever larger patterns without manual execution. Cascades over dams: design with the energy flows already present in microgravity rather than against them.

Self-aware, not conscious

Self-aware here means sensor-mediated: proximity sensing, environmental sensing for light and radiation, and nearest-neighbour mesh networking between tiles. That sensing turns assembly from a purely stochastic process, the way particles clump through Brownian motion, into guided convergent assembly governed by global rules and local interactions.

The payoff is practical. Less propulsion, less guidance and navigation planning, and less human or robotic construction, which means fewer astronaut EVAs. It also makes repair possible: damaged tiles can be jettisoned and standard interlocking tiles slotted into their place, the way base pairs are slotted into damaged DNA.