In this episode of The Bom: Engineering a Path Forward, I’m going to ask you to think about a rather futurist question: what does daily life look like in space? Sure, we have the Hollywood version of life amongst the stars. Star Wars, Dune, and even cult classics like Alien give us an idealistic glimpse. However, these are far from the reality of what it’s like to gather around and break bread in zero gravity.

Today’s guest is Sana Sharma, the co-founder and chief design officer at the Aurelia Institute, a non-profit space architecture R&D lab. Throughout this episode, she gives us an inside look into the incredible research she and her team have conducted into the ways that astronauts live their daily lives while on missions in the final frontier, how advanced technology doesn’t have to exclude the human factor, and how she hopes her research will change the future of space exploration.