It’s time to scale up life in space.
Aurelia Institute is a nonprofit space architecture R&D lab, education and outreach center, and policy hub dedicated to building humanity’s future in space.
At the cusp of humanity’s next metamorphosis into a spacefaring species, Aurelia Institute offers near-term innovation and open access community-building in support of our long-term vision for realizing an in-space society into the 21st century and beyond.
Space Architecture R&D
Space Policy
Human Scale Space Habitat Design
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Aurelia Academy & Horizon Zero-G Flight Program
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From space tourism to Mars missions to research and beyond, we are fast approaching a future where space is not limited to an elite few.
The Aurelia Institute team includes engineers and architects, designers, materials science and manufacturing experts, scientists, and policy thought leaders working together to create the community, innovation and ethics culture, and R&D foundation for expansive human space exploration.
We have a dual focus of space and Earth, with the goal of empowering life across extreme environments. We consider how space and Earth engage with each other during the dawn of the “Anthropocosmos.”
Our efforts are focused in three core areas:
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Aurelia Institute is an advanced technology research institute for foundational infrastructure for a space society. Our experts are concerned with the structures, materials, technologies, and in-space manufacturing techniques that will make it possible to build larger-scale habitats and increase the number and diversity of people who can participate in life in orbit. As our portfolio grows, and we can leverage the “road to space” of an emerging space economy, we will also explore surface habitats on celestial bodies in the near neighborhood of our solar system. We are a fast-moving fabrication and deployment team, with regular spaceflight launches to test and iterate on our engineering concepts. We are also a generator of translational IP for the public benefit, with a highly collaborative model for spinning out new technologies that may contribute to life in space.
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At Aurelia Institute, we want to make space real and accessible to all people. People of all ages, backgrounds, and skill sets should have the opportunity to understand what space is about, what’s available to them, how to get to space, and how they might live, play, and work effectively in different space environments. To that end, Aurelia Institute creates and collaborates on outreach programs to engage broad audiences in direct spaceflight opportunities , educational courses to broaden access to insider knowledge and train the next generation, and community building to grow a global, professional membership network. Aurelia offers a best-in-class flight mission academy to open, diversify, and empower access to space exploration.
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For space to be for everyone, it needs to be designed for everyone. For space habitation to be sustainable, it needs to be managed sustainably. Aurelia Institute’s policy arm considers the real and philosophical challenges of creating an inclusive, equitable, and accessible foundation for a society in space–from negotiating resource sharing in the “space commons,” to key governance questions for future human settlements, to the ethics of novel technology development upon which human life in extreme environments will depend.
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Aurelia Institute is a humanist group that cares about both the cutting-edge technical enablers and the cultural, philosophical under-pinnings for space exploration. Our position is that space exploration is not about escaping Earth. We’re building toward a better vision for humanity wherever we may be—on Earth, in orbit around it, and beyond.