NASA's Space Biology Program has selected a new round of research proposals on crops, repurposed medicines and the physiology of spaceflight, with principal investigators at ten institutions across eight states, most of them public universities.
The crop investigations include Jannell Bazurto at the University of Minnesota on plant-microbe dynamics for sustainable space farming; Miranda Haus and Robert VanBuren at Michigan State University on legume rotations in regolith simulants and on resurrection plants for bioregenerative systems; Christopher Taylor at Ohio State University on hydroponic microbes in low-carbon, high-radiation environments; and Shuyang Zhen at Texas A&M AgriLife Research on dwarf tomato growth for space agriculture, according to NASA's published selections.
Other proposals identify repurposed drugs that might mitigate spaceflight's effects on the body, study how radiation combines with other stressors across organ systems, and assess molecular changes that could yield early-warning detection of crew health problems. Nine of the awards go to investigators receiving Space Biology funding for the first time.
The pattern of the awards is the quiet story. The problems of feeding and keeping healthy a crew beyond Earth are being distributed across the land-grant system: Minnesota, Michigan State, Ohio State, Texas A&M. These are the universities states built for agriculture and engineering, now applying that brief to regolith and orbit.
Each award is modest next to a launch vehicle. Together they form the research base that decides whether long missions eat, breathe and recover. State News Journal will follow the projects as results are published.
The first-time funding for nine investigators matters beyond courtesy. Space biology has historically concentrated in a few centres; distributing it across eight states widens the field's bench and ties the programme's future to institutions that answer, ultimately, to state legislatures as well as to NASA.
NASA said the selected proposals span new crops, health countermeasures and the molecular bookkeeping of stress in space, and the agency's selections are published with investigator names and institutions for public inspection.
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