Today we’re republishing an epiosde with Dr Dorit Donoviel, Executive Director of the NASA-funded Translational Research Institute for Space Health at Baylor College of Medicine.

Dorit brings over two decades of experience in leading biomedical research to advance human health in space. With a robust publication record and a background in drug discovery and project management, Dorit steers innovative efforts to transition solutions from research to space operations.

In this episode, she unravels the physiological and psychological challenges of space travel and discusses pioneering approaches to maintain astronaut health beyond Earth’s orbit.

You’ll hear about Dorit's groundbreaking research, spanning from the impact of microgravity on human physiology to the intricate challenges of space radiation. With her expertise, we explore the complex interplay between the human body and the harsh environment of space, uncovering the necessity for resilience and adaptability in space.

In this episode you'll discover:

• Insights on how space acts as a laboratory for understanding human adaptation to extreme environments.

• The profound physiological effects of microgravity on the human body and the innovative strategies to mitigate them.

• The role of radiation in space travel, the limits of current protection methods, and the exciting potential of biological solutions for radiation defense.

• The psychological and interpersonal challenges of long-duration space missions and the importance of mental health for astronaut crews.

• The evolving landscape of space travel with commercial spaceflight's rise, enabling more countries to participate in space exploration.

Quote:

"We've been in a proxy war with Russia for over a year, and yet, we collaborate in space... those relationships are strong. So as long as you keep the door open and there's dialogue, there's hope. Space should bring us together as a species, rather than divide us."

- Dorit Donoviel

Episode Links:

Connect with Dorit on LinkedIn

TRISH at Baylor College of Medicine

NASA

Credits:

Production by CxS Partners LTD

Executive Producer: Toby Goodman

Audio & Sound Design: Lee Turner

Artwork: Ryan Field

Join the #1 community for equitable access to the business of space:

https://interastra.space/

Going to space is such a difficult problem to solve, and I say problem in a good way, a challenge, that it requires everybody different kinds of skill sets. And you never know where or how your idea can fit and solve a problem for us. My name is Dorit Doneville. I'm executive director of the Translational Research Institute For Space Health or TRISH for short. It's a consortium of Baylor College of Medicine, Caltech, and MIT based at Baylor here in Houston. We're a NASA funded institute charged with finding and funding innovations to keep humans healthy in deep space.

Dorit Doneville, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Hi, Toby. Excited to be here.

Tell me a little bit about who you are and what you do at Trish.

Yeah. So when I think about myself, I'm a biologist in my heart of hearts. I love living things, and, I had the fortune of stumbling into this amazing role that I've now sort of made my own, and it's just been a fantastic journey. I find space is the most remarkable environment to study the adaptation of living things to the environment, because it's such a provocative place. So in that context, that's my why. That's why I get up in the morning, and that's why I get excited about the work that I do. So to get into the work that I do, I am the executive director of a NASA funded institute. It's a virtual institute.

It's a consortium, that was created through a large grant made by NASA to the Baylor College of Medicine, which is a medical college educating and doing research and taking care of the people of, you know, health of people here at Houston, Texas, with consortium partners MIT and Caltech. So we wanted to make sure that we kinda cover the entire nation, you know, West Coast, East Coast, Gulf Coast. And our job is nothing short of understanding what the government needs and going out and finding problem solvents and giving them money through contractuals, arrangements, through grants, federal funding to make things that will keep humans healthy when we go to deep space. So that means beyond where we are today, deep space is anything outside of lower orbit where we no longer have the protection of earth and the atmosphere that protects us from radiation.

So can you describe to me some of the significant advancements in human space travel that have happened in recent years?

Yeah. So so, you know, when when when we first set humans into space, we we actually didn't know if humans could live in space. We actually didn't know if people could swallow, if their hearts would be okay, if all the processes that we take for granted for just living, breathing, eating, functioning would work in space. And so we figured out not only can humans live in space for long periods of time, upwards of a year now, there have been, I think, maybe 9 individuals overall who have lived more than a year in space, people are coming back relatively healthy. So over the last 20 years of continuous presence in space on essentially this remarkable platform where multiple nations have come together as a human species to live in space together despite warring with each other in some types on Earth. It's a remarkable thing. We figured out how to stay healthy in the zero g environment. So lots of lots of, insights have been made.

How do you keep bodies with sufficient bone and muscle and cardiovascular capacity, aerobic capacity to function with the lack of gravity, you exercise. And not only do you have to exercise, you have to keep up your protein, you have to keep up your vitamin d and your calcium intake. So that's one simple thing is we've really figured out how to keep humans healthy even when they're super sedentary. Okay. It may not sound like rocket science to, hey, you gotta exercise and eat your protein and take your vitamin d. But we now have a formula how to do that. That's like a low hanging fruit. But some of the other set innovations that have come forward really have to do with understanding our physiology.

So, for example, we've discovered this brand new syndrome that has to do with how the brain controls pressure and volumes. And you see these kinds of problems in patients here on Earth that may have hydrocephalus or babies that are born with hydrocephalus and patients that have all kinds of issues with brain trauma and the regulation of pressures and fluid in in the brain is not well understood. And now, we are actually using space as a laboratory to really figure out how does gravity play a role and what that means is how we put people, whether they're laying down or either upright or their head down, those are all vectors relating to gravity that we can start to understand how the body is controlling pressures and volumes inside the head. So lots of implications for Earth's benefits.

Doreen, tell me about the kinds of physiological impacts of space travel that you've seen on humans.

There are so many stressors in the space environment. So we'll start with the obvious, lack of gravity. Our bodies have adapted over time to adjust to the forces of gravity. We need gravity. We need loading on our bones, on our muscles, on our hearts in order to stay healthy, to maintain those. And and we're very efficient beings because when you don't need them anymore, you don't need the bones and you don't need the the muscles as much, then you get rid of them. So it's not a problem if you're always gonna live in space. But if you come back to Earth and now you have gravitational forces, then it becomes a problem.

Right? Because you you've lost all those things that you need to stay healthy. So that's gravity. Gravity affects every organ in the body, everything. And so, including your balance, the sense the senses in your body that tell you which way is up. Right? So it's a holistic thing. So that's a challenge. The second is once we leave the protection of our atmosphere, the magnetosphere around our planet, we are very much susceptible to the damage that comes from space radiation. And it requires so much material to block the heavy ions that come from galactic cosmic rays that it it's really impractical to shield spacecraft.

It's just too heavy. People have imagined in, you know, science fiction movies where you have, like, a a magnetic kind of shield around a craft, Those magnets, the amount of power it would take to run those magnets is just not feasible. So at the end of the day, we are going to have humans contend with chronic exposure to space radiation which will create not only damage to our DNA but also inflammation throughout the body because the body is gonna see this as a stress. Some of the other issues that we worry about probably as much as we do radiation is the fact that you're gonna put humans in a confined space for long periods of time and you're not gonna be able to, you know, have them look at anything beautiful like the earth or communicate with earth because the further you get away from earth, you're gonna have a communication delay. So, you could be able to pick up the phone and talk to your loved ones or or get a resupply of fresh fruits and vegetables. You're going to be confined in a space with, you know, maybe 3 other people that your boss picked out for you to go with on this long trip. You're gonna smell those people 247 for months months at a time. And, your your food supply is gonna be kinda crappy.

So I don't know about you but that does not sound to me like a fun journey. So we do kinda worry about mental health and how people will adjust to that. Yeah. We pick out resilient people but nobody's ever done this kind of confinement for this period of time.

In the medium term, what kind of length of journey were you talking about here, time wise?

Right. So everybody's talking about Mars. Right? So what does that trip to Mars look like? So with current propulsion capabilities today and and people are working on solutions to make the trip shorter. And the shorter the trip, the safer it'll be, obviously, and will solve a lot of these issues, you know, the lack of gravity, I mean, the radiation, the confinement. The shorter the shorter the trip, the better. But today, if we were to go today to Mars, which is where the agency has been thinking about for, you know, decades now, it's about 6 months journey to get to Mars where you're completely exposed to space radiation in your confined space. Okay. So people say, so what? So people have lived on the ISS for a year.

Well, yeah. ISS is fairly large. I mean, like, fairly massive and there's lots of places that you can go and be alone and get away from your crewmates. And you could look out the window and you could pick up the phone and talk to people and you're getting fresh resupply of all kinds of things every month or so. So, the confined space that we're thinking about for a vehicle to Mars, it's a lot smaller than the ISS. So, that is the worry. So, then, once you get to Mars, the planets, Earth and Mars, are on elliptical orbits with each other. Right? So you wanna by the time you get to Mars, you wanna arrive when Mars and Earth are the closest to each other.

Right? So then if you're gonna have any activities on the surface of the planet, then you gotta wait another year and a half for them to be in alignment again. So now you've got 6 months there and back, that's a year, plus a year and a half of for the planets to be aligned again, Earth and Mars. So you're talking 2 and a half years. And that's a really long time. Now on the surface of Mars, you could potentially imagine a larger habitat. There's things that you're doing. But even there, I mean, you've got no resupply. You gotta figure out the food situation.

Right? You still got the problem of radiation because the Mars atmosphere is very poor. It's not gonna block the space radiation. So how are you gonna protect those humans for the year and a half they're on the Mars surface, you know, from the space radiation? The gravitational forces are partial, so you have about a third gravity of Earth on the Mars surface. We don't think that's sufficient to keep you healthy. So you're still gonna have to keep up all of the exercise regiments and supplementations that we're currently doing today for 0 g. So two and a half years is a long period of time. Nobody's ever done this before.

Before we move to something less frightening, let's talk about fiction. There's loads of misconceptions, it seems, about what it's like living in space, being in space, maybe from films that we might be watching TV shows, etcetera. Can you debunk some popular myths about what's happening up there and and and what it takes to to travel?

My favorite thing is, you know, the how how people deal with 0 gravity. They just don't deal with it. They just pretend that there's, like, gravity boots or, you know, that you've got a rotating vessel and and you don't actually feel the rotation. I mean, we we haven't figured that out. All all of those artificial gravity things that you see in in, in sci fi movies, those are those are just wish wishes. It's fantasies, definitely fantasies. You know, people have been talking about creating artificial gravity, but what you would need to do is is a massive structure that would rotate. And then when you think about it, if as you're doing a rotation, it's not truly a gravitational force.

It's a centrifugal force. Right? And so depending on where you are along that that axis of rotation, it you're gonna experience different amounts of gravity. So well, so called gravity forces, right, that would simulate gravity. So if you're on the very end, you're gonna experience a lot more of a force pulling you, whereas with you in the center, you wouldn't. Right? So it's the gravitational thing is still a major major issue for us. You know, honestly, if you're gonna spend the money, I would rather spend it on countermeasures that that not artificial gravity because it's so complex and so difficult. Although, you know, SpaceX has recently launched a company, called VAST, where they're looking at spinning a a vehicle in order to create a a force for humans. It's a temporary solution.

It's not something you can keep up for very long. I can't imagine exactly how that would be, but, you know, people are have been trying all kinds of ideas, but creating gravity is no joke. We haven't figured that one out. That's probably top of mind. And then the second is, you know, the radiation. We do not know how to protect people from radiation using engineering solutions. About the only thing we can think of is probably need to burrow down about 17 feet into the lunar surface or the Mars surface in order to get enough material between you and the heavy particles that are coming at you, in order to protect a human being. So if you're gonna do any surface activity, you're gonna be exposed.

And so that means that we will probably have to give you some kind of radiation preventative, which to me is really exciting because as a biologist, I think about amping up your endogenous repair mechanisms. Like, you know, if I wanna protect myself from the harmful effects of a virus that could cause cancer, like, HPV that could cause cervical cancer, I wanna I wanna be able to boost up my immune system. I wanna boost up my own DNA repair mechanism in case I'm suffer damage from, you know, whether it be radiation from space or or radiation from the sun or, you know, radiation from a accidental exposure, right, from nuclear plants or something else. So, to me, it's all about making the biological organism, in this case, the human, more resilient to the environment. And to me, the advantage of thinking about how to keep humans healthy in space is pushing us to find what may someday be cancer preventative. I'd much rather have take a daily pill that would prevent me from getting cancer than have to deal with the effects of cancer.

What are you close to answering now? What do you feel you're close to answering?

Couple things that really excite me. I'm excited because I see a broken health care system. Right? We are spending so much money because we wait for the disease to manifest. It's too late. The train wreck's already happened. And now, you have to throw a lot of money at a problem and you often can't reverse the damage that's been done by the disease processes. So, I think of space as an incredibly powerful forcing function for us to prevent problems. And if you approach that from the perspective of human health, it's preventative medicine.

This is what we have to do. We cannot afford to have a human get sick in space. So we have to figure out a way to do everything in our power to make that human so resilient. That's number 1. Number 2, track that human so carefully so that we can detect changes that are clinically meaningful that say you have made a change in your physiology here. This change is an adaptive thing that's good for you because this is the right thing for your body to do in this environment or this is a pathway that's gonna lead to disease and a problem later. And to determine that, space is a great place to do that. And so, we can bring those insights back to earth.

And like I said before, the cancer preventative thing, same thing for cardiovascular problems, same thing for loss of bone, loss of muscle, same thing for loss of balance, same thing for kidney stones that are developing. It's all about prevention space. And so, what we've recently funded with our institute is a new way of thinking about the human. So imagine, like, your smartwatch or smartphone on steroids. That means is that this device will be in your pocket, is on you at all times. Most people carry their smartphones or they're wearing a Apple Watch or, you know, some kind of other smartwatch. This device will be responsible for monitoring your overall health at all times and interact with sensors from your environment. So if you're going to your friend's house and they've got a carbon monoxide leak, your phone or your sensor on your on your wrist is gonna detect that and it's gonna tell you you've been exposed to this.

It's kinda like the whole you've been exposed to COVID but on steroids. Right? So it's gonna completely stay with you and run constantly in the background an algorithm that tells it, have you changed from baseline? Line? How's your temperature? How's your respiration rate? How's your blood pressure? How's your blood sugar level doing? And you could do this now non invasively with little tiny patch that just sits on your skin and can detect all kinds of important biological markers. How's your mental health? It'll detect how much you're interacting with people. How close are you interacting? Are you coming close to other people? And your voice, are you developing a tremor in your voice? Are you exercising much? How's your sleep pattern? It's gonna integrate all of that information and give you what is normal for Toby. Right? And as Toby goes through his life, maybe you have changes throughout the month, maybe you have changes throughout the day or the week, it's gonna sense a range of what is normal for Toby. And then when some of those parameters get a little bit out of whack, it's gonna alert you. It's gonna say, hey, Toby. You know, for the last week, your temperature has been up, your activity levels are down, you're sleeping a little longer, you might be fighting off an infection, your white blood cells are a little bit elevated.

Maybe you shouldn't go out this Saturday night, party it up with your buddies. You know, it will give you those kinds of insights. You can make a decision about, you know, how to prevent your body perhaps getting to a place where it's highly compromised. So that's what we're putting in place right now and that's only doable in a controlled setting where you have a population that's very interested and committed to keeping themselves healthy. And we think that has many applications for Earth.

What's been the most mind blowing thing that you've discovered since you've been in your job that Some research has come to light where you've just been very happy.

Yeah. You know, actually, the insights that we're making with regards to how the brain is regulating what I alluded to earlier, the ray brain is regulating fluids and pressures. I mean, hardly ever do you come across a brand new medical syndrome, brand new. And, you know, as as as a physiologist, as a biologist, the the changes that occur in the brain and also the eye regions make perfect sense because the body is adjusting to this other environment. And the fact that it's doing so, it looks like pathology because if you lived on Earth, it would be a pathology. But maybe in space, it's not a pathology. So what what I mean by that is, you know, sometimes I mean, I hate to use kind of a cliche analogy, you know, Something bad may happen in your life. And in the moment, you think, this is awful.

But then, like, a month later or a year later, you look back and you go, man, that was, like, really good. It opened up opportunities. The adjustment made really was a good thing. So to me, that change in the body with what we're seeing is an increased pressure on the brain that's affecting the back of the eye, It it it blows my mind in the sense of the body's highly efficient. And maybe in some cases, those changes that appear like a pathology actually may be good, may be adaptive changes. So it just turns your assumptions on their heads. You know, it makes you, like, say, don't always assume that something is what it is in terms of, like, a good or a bad. Just get curious about this thing and say, let's find out more.

We don't know yet enough to say this is good or bad.

Few groups of people, Dewey, who may have the opportunity of working in space, in the business of space. You work in space, I don't think you've ever been to space. There's so many opportunities that I'm discovering. And so what would you say to a young person who was studying, thinking about maybe choosing what to study, about what the opportunities were in the business of space?

Yeah. I I absolutely would recommend it. You know? And if I was cynical, I would say, oh gosh, you know, it's such a small, tiny sector. Right? Like, if you think about if you're going to go into something, it's incredibly ambitious. It's people may not quite understand why the heck you're doing it. There's not as many funding opportunities particularly if you're doing research. The funding is quite limited compared to NIH funding, you know, or other types of DOD funding. But I said do it anyways.

And the reason is is it pushes you in ways that you have any you can't even think about. It's just like everything you take for granted is no longer on the table. It forces you to really test all your assumptions and do things in a more clever way, in a more efficient way. And so, to me, it's the ultimate challenge in problem solving. So if you enjoy problem solving and are curious about our bodies, ourselves, our planet, our environment, you know, it it's a bit cliche, but, you know, there's a famous saying, I can't remember which astronaut said this, but standing on the surface of the moon and looking back at the Earth because, you know, we went to the moon, but we what we did is we discovered the Earth. So when you think about space, like, for example, being highly efficient with our resources in space, we have to recycle all of our water. So today's coffee is tomorrow's coffee. We gotta recycle it.

Right? So we have to think about water conservation. We have to make sure, you know, the the air stays clean. We have to think about c 02 production. And we have to think about how to be real efficient with with our food production, because it's it's it's we have to. We can't we can't do agriculture or meat production in the same way in space. And so all those resources that we take for granted here on earth, it forces us to rethink them for the long term. Everything we do in space is about the Earth because whether we're in space or not or whether we're on Earth, we are the ones that we need to take care of. Right? It's a forcing function.

So I would say, yeah. Go into it. And but if you're gonna go into it, I would say also diversify. Also make sure that you have the applications that go beyond space and and they're everywhere. They're absolutely connecting the dots is not hard at all in terms of the benefits of the many things that you will do for the space program for Earth as well.

Just pushing you a tiny bit, are there any specific areas of study or skills that you feel are needed more today? You might say, right. Actually, these are needed if I'm trying to decide between certain sciences.

I'm really excited about engineering biology. Some people have called it synthetic biology. Synthetic biology makes people feel really uncomfortable. I think that that is the future. And I'll speak a little bit about more about that. So what is that? Engineered biology means that living things can be engineered to make products that are needed on Earth. So when I say products, it can mean anything. It could be from making insulin, which has been done by yeast for years, bacteria that make antibiotics themselves or a particular product, cells could be made to make a drug, a life saving drug like erythropoietin.

Or you can have microorganisms like fungi or different kinds of bacteria and yeast and plants. All of those things can be made to make food products that we absolutely need. So the reason we're investing in engineered biology, while people think about growing plants in space, they require a massive amount of resources. You know, the water, the lights, the infrastructure to recycle everything. And then if they fail, it's it's a technology disaster. If the plants fail and you're relying on those plants in space in that massive habitat, if something goes wrong with the habitat, you're you're really screwed. You don't have the food. So engineered biology is a much lower resource requirement than, like, massively growing just a lot of plants.

And so, another example of engineered biology is lab grown meats. It may not sound really good to you but it's actually you could take cow cells and grow them in a in a dish and you can 3 d print a steak. And you can 3 d print it with fat cells, which will marble it, make it taste yummy from a plant so that you don't have to deal with, you know, all the saturated fats that would normally come from the animal. So, the future is all about using engineered biology to make a more sustainable way to feed ourselves, whether it be in space or on Earth. So, it's a burgeoning field. It is, it's been coming along last 20 years. We have all the molecular tools in place. It's a matter of getting more people to understand what this means and not be frightened by it because because we've been engineering biology for a long time in the sense of by breeding.

Right? So it's just done over a long period of time. You would find, you know, the best looking cow or the best production cow for milk, and you would breed that cow. That's engineering biology. Or you would find the best stock of soybeans. Right? And you would just keep growing that stock or keep keep, you know, propagating that stock. That's engineering biology, just done the old fashioned way. So I think that that is the future and I would be really excited to see more people go into that.

Let's talk about midlife workforce. We're calling these people who are thinking about changing career. I just spoke to one earlier. What kind of skills people already have that can translate over, that can move across to this thing? Where can we find leaders that may wanna move across?

You know, it's interesting you say that because almost every single person with the exception of maybe one that I've hired since I've become director of this institute many years ago has had to learn from scratch how to do solve problems in space. So you take a human or you take a a biological organism, it's the same problems wherever you put it. And so that's on the biology and the human side of things. I think the most important skill set or the most important quality, let's start with quality, is curiosity. Sustained curious and and challenging your own assumptions. For me, that's key because you you sometimes go along and and you're in the box because you've never thought about the problem really deeply. Right? And so having somebody from the outside question me about what what do you mean by fluids in the brain? What what staying curious and humble about you may not understand everything, you know, and and asking a lot of questions. And then the most important thing for me is is probably, you know, really being willing to look across sectors.

Right? So to recognize that you may have been working in oil and gas or you may have been working in mining or you may have been working in, you know, computer science. Space touches all of those areas. We need problem solvers from every single sector because that's what it's gonna take to really make humans thrive and survive and live, explore these very challenging environments. It it it's gonna take everybody. It's gonna take subsea engineers who understand how to move fluids. Right? It's gonna take people who have been working on AI because guess what? We are gonna have to rely on a decision support software that will augment our human crews in making medical decisions on the surface of Mars when you have a medical emergency because we have a 40 minute delay in communication with Earth back and forth. So computer scientist could make an impact here. Every single sector could contribute to the area of space.

So there's 3 more types of opportunity. Think about opportunity for these 3 types of people. The first one would be a small business owner or an entrepreneur. You know, what's the opportunity there? It's away from government contracting, but how could they help? And and actually, maybe they could get a government contract. I don't know. Then the big business leaders, the people with established companies who are thinking about moving into space, what like, what should they do? What what should they be looking for? And the collaboration between all of those 2 and government leaders, the governments around the world, not just US, what does that look like?

So the small business owners, you know, it depends on what sector you're in. I mean, if you're in health or tech or, you know, manufacturing or water filtration or, you know, any of those sectors that you think about. If you've got an innovation, if if you've got something that you think could potentially be useful to the government, then you should absolutely let us know. You know, we vet all kinds of ideas. You know, people can we have, like, a little form and people will just and and if it's a good idea, I will send it to the right person at NASA. I typically know, like, if it's not up my alley relating to health and human performance or it has something to do with, you know, like I say, water filtration or air filtration or c 02 scrubbing or something like that, I will send it somebody else's way. And I do that all the time. And and the beauty of where I sit is, I call it the space pixie dust.

Everybody everybody's so interested and excited to help the space program. They send they send things our way. So that's lovely. So that's one potential, opportunity. Now if you're in doing health care or human health or feeding or, you know, feeding of people, and when I say health, I mean holistically, mental health is included in there, then then we wanna hear from you. If you've got a an interesting solution, we absolutely wanna hear from you. So that's an easy one for small business owners. A lot of the companies that we fund are actually small companies.

We give them awards. These are federal grants. Okay. So for big businesses, for example, Honeywell or, you know, an Exxon or Shell or, you know, some giant program like that, space is the future. In 50 years, I I really do anticipate that we will have a presence in space. And if you're cynical about it or, you know, just look and see where other nations are investing. China and and India in particular are heavily investing in space. So while there's been a lot of back and forth with how much America should invest in space, you know, from a geopolitical point of view, if you're not in space, you're not relevant.

So there will be a space economy. Hopefully, we believe because of companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin and others that are investing heavily in these areas, self subsidized by these multi billionaires, there will be a commercial activities as well. It's not just going to be the province of government. Yesterday's landing was by a commercial entity, commercial company. It's not the government that's landing on the moon. So if you're not in space, you're gonna be left behind. You have to be thinking about it. It may be too early for some companies but keep it on your radar screen because there may be opportunities for your company to get engaged.

That's what my advice would be to the large companies. And government leaders already spoke about that. You know, what we're seeing now with commercial spaceflight opening up opportunities for governments that have have never had access before, it's a matter of national pride for them, for Hungary to send somebody up, for Turkey to send somebody up, for UAE and Saudi Arabia. You no longer have to be best friends with the US government to go to space. You could just pay the ticket and send one of your citizens to space and have that citizen be the inspiration for many young people in your country to stay in school and become engineers and scientists and physicians and geologists and really kind of improve your entire nation's standing and quality of life through education. So, we're seeing more and more countries that have never before had aspirations in space, getting involved now. I read somewhere that there's over 70 different space programs that have been initiated just in the last, like, 2, 3, 4 years and it's because of commercial space flight. It's just enabled everybody to play.

So everybody's getting into this game and don't be left behind.

I love it.

You said that I'm I'm in the humanity orbit. That covers a lot. We talked about health and performance and all of that. But, you know, every once in a while, you gotta stop and sort of reflect. And, personally, it's it's really easy to get bogged down by all the negative things that happen in the world. Truly, in space, there are efforts underway to keep it peaceful. Right? Particularly, Artemis Accords. We wanna explore our cosmic neighborhood as a species together because no one nation could do it alone.

I mean, nobody has enough resources and money, and we need to partner. And that, again, space is a forcing function for partnering on the geopolitical scale. So think about this. You know, we've been kind of in a proxy war with Russia for over a year. And yet, we're collaborating in space. We continue to collaborate in space. And those relationships are strong. So as long as you keep the door open and there's dialogue, there's hope.

Right? There's hope for us to continue to work together. So I think I think on the humanistic side of things, let's not underestimate how much space could do for us if if we keep we keep our eye on the ball that, you know, space should bring us together as a species, right, rather than divide us.

Is there life on Mars?

Absolutely. I'm sure. There's a microorganism, and they're somewhere buried in the ice under the ground. Absolutely. No doubt about it. There's absolutely life in our solar system and beyond. No doubt about it.