Jas Purewal is a research scientist in the UK and a pioneering figure in the world of analog space missions. Jas’s career journey, from an early fascination with space at the Kennedy Space Center to leading the largest analog space mission project globally, exemplifies the dynamic interplay between passion and innovation in the space industry.

Growing up in Warwickshire, Jas’s path was influenced by her British Asian heritage, with a strong emphasis on education and learning. Her work today bridges cultures and scientific disciplines, bringing together diverse teams to simulate and prepare for future space missions.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• How Jas’s childhood visit to Kennedy Space Center inspired her space ambitions.
• A journey from astrophysics to leading analog space missions.
• The significance of analog missions in preparing for real-life space exploration.
• Insights into the largest analog space mission project.
• The challenges and rewards of promoting space science.

Quote:

“I grew up in the Midlands in the UK in Warwickshire, and like many British Asians, my parents were huge proponents of learning, academia, all of that.”

- Jas

Episode Links:

Connect with Jas Purewal on LinkedIn

Analog Astronaut Conference 2024

The World's Biggest Analog

The World’s Biggest Analog on LinkedIn

Instagram (@worlds_biggest_analog)

Instagram (@ukspacexplorer)

Habitat Marte on LinkedIn

Biosphere 2

Credits:

Production by CxS Partners LTD 

Executive Producer: Toby Goodman

Audio & Sound Design: Lee Turner

Artwork: Ryan Field

Find your place in the business of space: https://interastra.space

It's possible for almost anyone to actually make a contribution and be part of the business of space. And I think that's quite right as well because I think space is for everybody.

Hi. I am Jas Purewal, and you are listening to 'Your Business in Space'.

My day job is as a research scientist in the UK.

And then outside of work, I'm heavily involved with things called analog space missions, which are basically space simulation missions.

And I guess my role in that originally started when I met, Dr. Sian Proctor online.

It was during the pandemic. And, I hadn't even heard of the term 'Analog Astronaut' until I met her.

And I discovered what it was. And through that, through my friendship with her, I basically ended up being the director of the Analog Astronaut Foundation.

And then subsequently now, the founder and director of the world's biggest analog project, Which, is an incredible opportunity for people to get involved who aren't involved in the space industry. So I grew up in the Midlands in the UK in Warwickshire, a very nice part of the country. And like many British Asians, so from a job y background. My parents were huge proponents of like learning, academia, all of that. So, you know, do well at school.

And I guess I had a kind of natural interest in science growing up, but I was gonna probably go down the traditional route of go and become a doctor as like a, you know, nice career or something that your parents kinda push you into and think is good. I liked the idea of doing that too. Until I think I was 9 years old. And, my dad used to sometimes, go to the US for work trips. And this time he managed to get a free ticket for us and me and my brother and my mom. And so we flew over to America. And one of the things we did was go to Florida and Disney and all of that stuff, but also to the Kennedy Space Center. And I remember walking into the Kennedy Space Center and one of the first things you see is like a person dressed up as an astronaut.

And I still remember how incredible they looked. And he and he had this, like, gold visor and, like, this incredible helmet and everything. And I just kind of fell in love with that. It just I suppose it just sparked the imagination or whatever, and it spoke to kind of my adventurous side of things and going through the Kennedy Space Center. That's the first memory I have of thinking I want to be an astronaut. And just falling in love with space. I wanted to learn as much about space as possible. And I kind of that was the dream.

And then, you know, watching sci fi just kind of carried upon sparking that kind of dream. Yeah. And then so school, you know, like I said, science was kind of my subject. I I really enjoyed physics, which kind of tied in quite nicely with space in a way. I liked understanding how things worked. And I remember when you have to decide basically what you're going to study at university. I was still thinking oh shall I go and do medicine? I also like flying airplanes so shall I go study aeronautical engineering? And then one of my teachers was like you should study whatever it is that you're most passionate about and most interested in. And don't worry about the job.

So I was like, okay, well in my case it's astrophysics. So, ended up studying astrophysics because of the love of space and combining that with the, you know, understanding of how things work, which is the physics side of things. I ended up doing that at union then graduating and thinking, what the hell am I gonna do with this degree now? You know, for anyone that's kind of graduated with a general subject like something like physics, you can pretty much go into almost any career. And I had no idea what I was gonna do. So I was just kind of looking at these brochures I picked up at a career fair, and I came across 1 and there was an equation in there that I recognized. And I was like, oh, I could probably do this job. I'll just apply to this. I ended up going, making the application, getting a job interview.

And I remember my thoughts at the time were, like, I don't really want this job. And my dad saying, well, just go for the practice to the interview. So I did. And then I I guess not wanting the job came across as maybe being confident, so I was offered the job. And then again thinking I don't really want this job. And mom saying well just take the job and then if you apply for something else comes along you can always do that. So I, I took the job. And, 15 years later, I'm still working as a research scientist for that original company.

And it, yeah, it's been pretty good. Ever since, I guess I had kind of given up on the dream of actually seriously becoming an astronaut. It's not something that seems realistic. If you're if you live in the US, if you're a US citizen, obviously NASA is kind of where you would go for that. In the UK, even though we have, you know, ESA, the European Space Agency, the rate at which they recruit astronauts is, like, every 10 10 years or every decade. And, you know, the odds of still being recruited into astronauts is extremely slim. So I never realistically thought I'd actually be able to do that. So I kind of gave up on that dream of space.

And, it was Dr. Sian Proctor, which I think many people will know. 1 of the, the well, the first commercial SpaceX Inspiration 4 pilot. And I started watching her web series and I was like, this is amazing. What and she spoke of the term called analogs, an analog astronaut. And I was like, what is this? I started googling it. And I discovered all these missions around the world, all these habitats around the world where you could go and live and work as though you were an astronaut living and working either on the moon or on Mars or possibly even a space station. And it was open to the general public as open to specifically researchers and scientists. So it just sounded ideal.

It was a way to be involved in space without actually being in the space industry. So, from that, basically, that was like the door opened for me. And the rest is kinda history and everything kinda led on from there. So I discovered, yeah, this term analog astronauts. And, I started googling this and bearing mind, remember this is during a pandemic. So I had no way of actually you know, we were in lockdown. You couldn't travel. You could let alone leave, really a house for for many things, you couldn't travel to another country to an analogue habitat to go on a mission.

So I thought if I can't go to the analog, I'll bring the analog to me. So what I actually ended up doing was I built a geodesic dome, which sounds a lot fancier than it is. It was basically a dome made from broom handles. So cutting the broom handles to size. So it was a 4 meter diameter dome. So it was pretty decent size for 1 person and that was basically my habitat. I put the the use these hubs to connect the broom handles together so that made up a frame and then used sun sail material that you use for like shade in the garden. Used that as the material because it's waterproof to be the outside of the dome.

I'm actually recruited my parents into helping. And I actually built this in their back garden because their back garden's big. And so I was actually able to house it there. And so, you know, that was mom sewing on her sewing machine, sewing these sun cells together to make the wrap for the outside. Anyways, so that was my habitat. And at the same time I was participating in a virtual hour mission with Habitat Marte who are based in Brazil. And they invited Sian as a speaker on that virtual mission. And during that, we had some q and a, and so I asked her a couple of questions, and I also kind of mentioned a few things.

And then after that, I reached out to her. And I mentioned that I was doing my own analog mission in my parents' back garden. And I guess that was probably enough for her to be like, who is this crazy British woman? What is she doing? And she responded. I asked her if she would be my adviser for the mission. And then, yeah, just from that, we kind of got talking. We started talking regularly. And became friends having never actually met each other. We became friends virtually.

And she shared the idea with me that she'd had for a long time, which was to create a community online, just a central hub where all analog astronauts could be and gather such that they could instead of I think, you know, people would ask her a lot of questions like how could I go on a mission? Instead of asking her, they could ask the hub directors directly. And she said, would you help me with this? And I was like, yes, great idea. Of course. So we, created this online community and we decided to launch it with a virtual conference because it was still the pandemic. So I was helping her with that. And then of course she received the information that she was actually gonna go up on the Inspiration 4 mission, the SpaceX first commercial mission, to actually go into space, which was obviously life changing and incredible. So I ended up taking over that project completely. So I had to run that virtual conference by myself, and she had the best excuse obviously in the world.

There's not a better excuse than I'm actually going to the space. So, you know, could you do this for me, please? And, yeah, freely from that, like, the virtual conference, was a hit, because that was good. The following year, lockdown had lifted, and we decided to hold the conference in person. I believe Sian suggested why not have a Biosphere 2 in Arizona. She lives in Arizona, so she was familiar with it. Biosphere 2 is this incredible, incredible destination. If you don't know what Biosphere 2 is, definitely look it up. It's amazing.

Like the destination is perfect for our community and for our conference. It's like this it's informal. It's a scientific research area and it's also like being on campus. In some ways, it's like running your own little mini analog at the conference itself. I kind of use the analogy of it's a mini analog, but also, like, it feels has a little bit of festival vibe to it sometimes as well. So, it's a pretty unique conference, and we capped the numbers to, like, a 120 as well. So it feels intimate, and you get to talk to everybody. So that's really how that happened.

And then the World's Biggest Analog project grew from that community. I was you know, so the goal of the community was to get everybody talking. So we had all the different habitats and the habitat directors from all these habitats around the world talking to each other through the community and the conference now. But one of the first things that became apparent very early on was that not a lot of people know about analogs. There's even people at NASA who don't know what analogs are, and NASA runs their own analogs. NASA's been doing analogs since, like, the holidays. You know, ESA have their own analogs too. So I wanted to do something big that would raise awareness for what analogs were are.

And I also wanted to you know, we got people talking to each other. Now let's get them working together. So it seemed like next logical step. But the important thing was to do something big. So at the at the conference, I basically posed the question in a, like, workshop session. Like, imagine, you know, just think outside the box. Imagine you had no constraints. Money was no object.

So that's kinda cool. But really, the goal is to answer the question, how are we gonna live and work in space as a community, a diverse community? Because eventually, humanity's permanent presence in space, or let's start with the moon, is not just gonna be NASA and other government space agencies. It's gonna be government space agencies from lots of different countries, lots of different cultures, also private industry as well. So how are all these different countries cultures and different types of companies gonna work together in a collaborative way? And I always like to use the analogy of Antarctica, how you have all these different nations living and working in a really hostile environment, and they collaborate, and they come together, and they help each other. And we kind of foresee a similar situation to that on the moon. And so that's really the goal of the world's biggest analog mission, or WBA, I call it, for short, is to try and answer that question. And I really think, like, now is that the timing is right, for this quest for us to start thinking about these kind of questions. When it comes to the business of space the biggest misconception is that it's difficult to enter, to be involved.

I think what I learned from all of these kind of activities is that, yes, there are gatekeepers for space companies, but it's possible for almost anyone to actually make a contribution and be part of the business of space. And I think that's quite right as well because I think space is for everybody. To be successful in space, I believe you need to have a lot of passion. And that's something that's not in short supply when it comes to space. I've met a lot of passionate people. And not just to be passionate. I think you have to start doing things. I think action is the key.

I think building something and to share what you've built and to show people that you're building something is important because then you're gonna attract people similar to you who like what you're doing and who might wanna work with you. The best bit of advice that I can give about the business of space is if you're not going down the traditional route of working for a space company, then I strongly advise forging your own path. And to me, that could be that could start with, like, volunteering, or that could be starting your own side projects. And it could even extend to your own startup or your own business. I really think that we're at the kind of the cusp of you know, space is growing as an industry. We're kind of at the exciting phase right now where we don't really know exactly what's hap gonna happen or which companies are gonna survive and thrive. Obviously, there's some kind of obvious. But I really think there's a lot of opportunity in space right now.

And so it's just finding that opportunity. The thing that excites me the most, the opportunities that I'm most excited about in the business of space are that because the commercial space industry is gonna start to grow and we're gonna start sending essentially tourist crews into space, That means that all the similar services that you have on Earth are going to be there's gonna be a place for them in space. So you have hotels. It's gonna be space hotels. All the trades. All of them. Entertainment as well. You know.

You've gotta entertain people in space. So there's going to be all of the same things you see on Earth happening in space. And I think that's kind of exciting. But what's even more exciting to me is the opportunity now to build something from scratch in a way that's better than we've built it on Earth already. And to think about all the things that we didn't think about when we first started building on Earth, we can start thinking about that now in space. And that's, to me, is exciting. That that's the best thing as well. It's like, we tried it once.

So if you didn't get a chance to participate now, maybe in the future, but very excited about that.

I'm Jas Purewal, and you've been listening to 'Your Business In Space'.

All the ways to connect with me are in the links in the show notes.

To discover more, head to interastra.space

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