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“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center from Houston, Texas, home for NASA’s astronauts and Mission Control Center. Listen to the brightest minds of America’s space agency – astronauts, engineers, scientists and program leaders – discuss exciting topics in engineering, science and technology, sharing their personal stories and expertise on every aspect of human spaceflight. Learn more about how the work being done will help send humans forward to the Moon and on to Mars in the Artemis program.

On Episode 186, Cherie Oubre, Steve Platts, and Nikki Schwanbeck, expert human researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, discuss CIPHER, a complement of research protocols that investigates multiple aspects of the human body over varied durations of human space missions. This episode was recorded on February 26, 2021.

Transcript

Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 186, “The Next One-Year Missions.” I’m Gary Jordan and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight. Many may remember the popular One-Year mission, in recent history, where Scott Kelly of NASA and Mikhail Kornienko of Roscosmos spent just about a year on the International Space Station to understand what happens to the human body in space for that long. Astronauts today, typically spend about six months on station. Some like Christina Koch have spent closer to a year. And we have a good amount of data from crew members on these long-duration flights, and quite a lot from short-duration missions during shuttle, where crew members spent just a few weeks in space. But to travel deeper into space, we’ll need a good understanding of what happens to the human body from missions that surpass a year. A human mission to Mars will be just shy of two years at a minimum. To better understand this question, NASA is planning extended missions aboard the International Space Station, a bit closer to home. It sounds like a general question, right. What happens to the human body over the course of more than a year in space? But the truth is that this single question is being asked from so many angles. What happens to the gene expression, the vascular calcium, vision, bones, neurovestibular system? Many researchers want to know the answers. So, an integrated protocol called CIPHER is bringing together a huge number of disciplines to investigate as many interesting aspects to an extended human mission on the International Space Station as possible. Of course, CIPHER is an acronym and stands for the Complement of Integrated Protocols for Human Exploration Research. Returning to the podcast is Dr. Cherie Oubre. She described her role as a Deputy Element Scientist for Flight with NASA’s Research, Operations, and Integration Element at the Johnson Space Center during Episode 127, essentially as the grand integrator of all things human research. She is taking the helm as the Chief Project Scientist for CIPHER. Also returning for the third time on the podcast is Dr. Steve Platts. Platts is the Deputy Chief Scientist of the Human Research Program and was integral in the execution of the Twins Study, which was conducted concurrently along the one-year mission and is very familiar with integrating research in a single mission. Nikki Schwanbeck is the Deputy Element Manager for Flight with NASA’s Research Operations and Integration Element at the Johnson Space Center and is the Project Manager for CIPHER. It’s her job to manage the overall project from development to implementation alongside Dr. Oubre. So, let’s get right into it. The Next One-Year Missions with Cherie Oubre, Steve Platts, and Nikki Schwanbeck. Enjoy.

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Host: Cherie, Steve, and Nikki, thank you so much for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast today. I am very excited to dive into this topic. We’re talking about this approach to conducting the future of extended missions, and really, it’s a whole suite. There’s a lot of integration going on. And I want our audience to first sort of get familiarized with our voices because we have — your voices because we have three qualified experts right here. And so, I want to make sure everybody gets a chance to speak and we get to know you guys a little bit better. Nikki Schwanbeck, I want to start with you. By giving us essentially an overview of what we’re going to be talking about today, CIPHER. So, Nikki, what is CIPHER?

Nikki Schwanbeck: CIPHER is a acronym for the Complement of Integrated Protocols for Human Exploration Research. It’s a complement of 17 research protocols from NASA and several international partners that look across the multiple systems in the human body by collecting data, biological samples, and various measurements before, during, and after an astronaut’s mission in space.

Host: And so, you are the project manager for CIPHER. So, what’s your role in running this — we can call it a protocol, we can call it a project, whatever you want to call it. What’s your role?

Nikki Schwanbeck: So, my role in this is, as a project manager, is to manage the overall project from development to implementation alongside Dr. Oubre.

Host: All right. Dr. Oubre, you are — let’s see. We have you as the Chief Project Scientist for CIPHER. So, you are — we talked to you a little bit before on one of our previous episodes about integrating all of the human research efforts into — altogether, to make sure everyone’s talking and nothing’s getting dropped. And so, this might be sort of a ultimate challenge for you. So, kind of describe your role in this as the Chief Project Scientist and your role in integrating everything.

Cherie Oubre: Yeah. So, my role — I work with each of the individual [Principal Investigator] PIs and pull together the research that they need to answer the questions for their particular discipline and put that into one package that we can implement on each individual crew member. So, 17 different studies pull together, so it’s a lot of different people, a lot different moving parts. But we have a great team behind us to help us put everything together and make it run smoothly.

Host: And that is — that’s quite the job there. So, when you talk about 17 different disciplines, give us a couple of examples. What are we talking about? What’s all getting pulled into CIPHER? What are some of the disciplines we’re considering?

Cherie Oubre: So, yeah. We’ve kind of grouped it into about six different groupings of studies. So, we have 17 total. So, I’ll start — we have some bone and joint studies that really look at how the bone changes, so bone loss, structure, microarchitecture changes. And even some of the — changes in the cartilage and ultimate balance, bone mineral balance changes. So, we have a group of about four PIs that are looking into those types of research in understanding how this spaceflight changes over that time course for the bone and joints.

Host: So, that’s a really good example. When you’re thinking about just that — you know, this is just — this one aspect of it, right? There’s a lot of different aspects to this, but — and it’s an integrated study and there’s a kind of a wide expanse of timeframes that you’re talking about here. Really, you’re trying to collect a lot of data, so for you, for your team, for everyone that’s involved, really, the PIs. Why is this integrated protocol? Why is this effort CIPHER so important?

Cherie Oubre: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, the reason we’re doing CIPHER — we’re really excited about CIPHER. This is the biggest effort that we’ve done to really look across the whole human in spaceflight and understand how the changes that occur, how that happens to the whole human. We’ll look at different disciplines, but we’re going to integrate that and look at the changes in relation to each of the disciplines themselves. So, right now, we have a lot of data for those particular six-month-missions. And, in this study, we’re going to look at short six-week missions; we’re going to look at six-month; and we’re going to look at year mission to look at the changes, how that happens over the time course, and give us the information we need for us to make it safely to Mars. What we need to do to help — the human make it that far.

Host: And that’s really important. Now, Steve, we’ve had you on before to talk about the Twins Study, and that was part of the — or I guess it was a different aspect of the one-year-mission, right. When you’re talking about what — when Nikki and Cherie are talking about integrating all these different ideas into a single mission, it’s not like this is completely new, right. We’ve done this before with the one-year mission, so give us a little history here on what we did before.

Steve Platts: Sure. On the previous one-year mission, we had — at the time, it was the largest single study that we’ve done. Scott Kelly did a ton of research, more research than we’ve ever had done by a single crew member on station. And yet, we talked about having 17 studies combined into this one CIPHER. If you look back, our Twins Study, which was incredibly complicated, was only ten studies. So, even though we’ve learned a lot about integrating, we’ve learned how to get these investigators together, how to get them to work together, where we can get synergy between the groups, right. Because you have all these groups, and some of them want blood at this timepoint; some of them want blood at another timepoint; some of them want to do all different kinds of recordings. So, we have to kind of corral them and get them to all work together so that we’re not, you know, sticking the crew members every single day, or we’re not taking too much blood, or we’re not utilizing a certain machine too much. So, just that coordination. We learned how to do it. Probably the most important thing was that we learned we could do it, right. It’s not just a pipedream. It’s not something we’re thinking about. No, it’s [inaudible]. No, no. We’ve done it before, so we know we can do it. We’re incredibly excited about doing it. It’s going to be a challenge. I mean, we’ve been working on this for I think four years. Because when we first proposed doing these studies, I was in a different department and I was the Project Scientist. And then when I moved up to the Program Level, Cherie took over, and so it’s been a long road and a lot of work. And we’re just getting to the point where we’re going to be able to see that come to fruition, and so — but it’s a very exiting — a ton of work. We’re still working out all the details. When we selected these studies, we did a call, international call, really. It’s an international study. And we’ve had tons of investigators propose to do work. And so, we had to go through that whole process of selecting them, so that we could get studies that represented all the different systems of a body. We didn’t want to leave anything out. We didn’t want to have parts here — oh, well, we figured out everything about the brain and the heart, but we don’t know anything about the eyes. No, no, no. We wanted to make sure we had everything covered. And so, we selected these 17 studies to do that. So, a lot of work. We’re very excited about it.

Host: I’m curious. Just pulling again from that knowledge. I think you give such a great example and it kind of shows what some of the challenges with having this integrated study. And the example you gave was on blood, right, because you need a blood sample for this study and for this study and for this study. It sounds like what you guys are doing is you are corralling everyone to say, “OK, this blood study is going to happen, so here’s what’s going to happen.” You’re going to get this blood study, and we’re going to — it sounds like you’re going to share it, right. So, like you said, the astronaut isn’t poking and prodding him or herself over and over again. It sounds like it’s — your job is to make it heavily coordinated and very efficient.

Steve Platts: Yeah. We’re coordinating the timing, we’re coordinating the volumes, because we can only take a certain amount of blood from an astronaut in any given month. So, that’s how we monitor it. You don’t want to take too much because you could potentially cause, you know, problems for the astronaut. So, we have limits. And so, we have to spread things out. And when you said sharing, that’s exactly right. They’re sharing that blood. We’re taking samples on certain days and we’re saying, “OK, this study gets this amount, that study gets that amount.” And that’s the main thing Cherie’s having to deal with right now is to go through all of that, work out who gets what and when.

Host: Cherie, that sounds like quite the job. How’s that coming along?

Cherie Oubre: Well, we have an amazing PI team that have worked tirelessly. It took us about a year-and-a-half to figure out how we could organize the blood, how we can share not only samples, but the data itself, too. So, if they were going to do some similar measures, one PI and another PI, we’re going to do the same measure, they worked out how they can share the data and only take that measurement once. So, we are doing that, and uh — Scott, Dr. Scott Smith, who’s part of the Nutritional Biochemistry Lab at Johnson Space Center, is helping to organize that for us. And I think it’s been a great success of this team to be able to get as much data as they can and minimize the blood volume.

Host: Now, Steve, when you were talking about some of the different — you know — you wanted to make sure everybody was included, you were mentioning, for CIPHER. I wonder, looking back at the one-year study, that you said — it was an integrated study. You were having a lot of folks chime in and wanted to have their own investigational research into the one-year study, into the Twins Study even, too. But I wonder if that sparked more interest from folks that didn’t get a chance to do the one-year study and say, “hey, this is super-interesting. I want to make sure my field is represented.” Did you get more interest after that study?

Steve Platts: You know, I think we really did. We had — when we were doing the reporting out for the Twins Study, we had lots of people interested. We were getting emails and phone calls. You know, we did a lot of press interviews and things and everybody wanted to be involved the next time we did it. And when we had to select people for this one-year mission, we included a lot, but not all, of the investigators from before because it’s a bigger study. You know, we wanted to do very similar science so we could compare it, and in some cases, we’re doing exactly the same thing that we did before. But, you know, it’s been five years. Believe it or not, it’s been five years since we did the one-year mission. So, you know, things have changed. We’ve learned a lot since then, so we’re not doing exactly the same things, but we are doing a lot of the same science and some newer, even more advanced science as well.

Host: So, Cherie, your job is to kind of be the grand wrangler here, making sure everything gets — all the disciplines get represented. And it sounds like the — it is a little bit of a scale up, right. There’s a lot that we learned from one-year mission that we’re taking into CIPHER from, you know, even Twins Study, all these integrated studies. What’s changing to make CIPHER better, more integrated, more efficient? What’s changing?

Cherie Oubre: So, for CIPHER, not only, I mean, is it more disciplined. It’s more PIs. We’re actually doing a whole lot more of measurements. So, the one-year mission had a great set of research and measurements that were taken on the crew. What we’ve done is we kind of just scaled that up and we did increase the amount of data collection sessions and really did a — it’s a robust set of science on each of those crew members to get that whole person look at what’s changing throughout the flight.

Host: Now, Nikki, kind of give us a snapshot of exactly what we’re looking at here because we keep talking about one-year mission, right. And it’s a little bit beyond that when we’re talking about CIPHER. There’s short duration; there’s standard duration; there’s extended duration. When you take a snapshot of all these different elements, how does everything come together?

Nikki Schwanbeck: All the crew members are going to be performing the same testing pre- and post-flight. It doesn’t matter what their duration is in-flight. What they do pre-flight, what they do post-flight is the same. And then the only difference is their testing in-flight is based on how long their mission is. So, how many times they repeat that test will be based on how long their mission is. So, if they’re there for six weeks, they may do the test twice. If they’re there for six months, they’ll do it five or six times. If they’re there for a year, it may be up to 12 or 13 times.

Host: I see. So, Cherie, walk us through — let’s just say I’m a crew member going to the International Space Station, and let’s just say I’m going for your standard six-month duration. What’s that going to look like from pre-flight to the actual flight to post-flight. What source of activities can I be expected to participate in as a space station crew member?

Steve Platts: Actually, here, let me take that one. So, if you’re going to do the CIPHER study — so, remember, we have three different durations. What will happen is about a year before your mission, you’ll start doing our experiments. So, we’ll have scans of your body. We’ll be doing lots of questionnaires. We’ll be doing blood draws. We’re doing ultrasound, all those kind of things to get all those different organ systems. And then, once you get into flight, we will replicate a lot of those studies. Now, some of them we can’t do because the equipment to do them is only available here on Earth, like the big x-ray machines. They weigh way too much and take up too much space to fly to the space station. But we do have ultrasound. So, we’ll do a lot of ultrasound studies up there. We’ll do blood draws, saliva, urine, fecal samples, all those kinds of things. And then, when you return, as soon as you return, hit the ground. We’ll be doing studies and we’ll do various things again. Lots of blood draws, saliva. We’ll be doing scans again. As soon as they get back to JSC, we’ll be doing the scans with the big machines as well, so it’s a lot of work. And it’s a big commitment from the crew. And, you know, we tell them long before what the work is going to be. And we get great cooperation from the crew. They really want to participate in the science. They see it as part of their mission. And so, they’re very dedicated to it. So, it could be years of follow-up work after the one-year mission. So, like I say, it’s a lot of work, but we’re very grateful to the crew for volunteering to do it.

Host: Yeah. Looking back at one-year mission, I think one of the — or even the Twins Study, too, there was this — and I might be saying it wrong, Steve, so feel free to correct me. The problem with the study, not — just as a whole, is that you have such a small sample size. You got two crew members for the one-year mission, and then you got the — for the Twins Study, you got Scott Kelly and Mark Kelly. And then that’s it, right. So, what’s nice about CIPHER it sounds like is now, as long as you can get the — a good amount of participation from the astronaut corps, you can have a larger sample size and have more meaningful data.

Steve Platts: That’s exactly right. And that’s the way we planned it out. So, as you said, very low, and one or two, for the previous one-year mission. As you’ve heard already, this is going to be an n of 30, right. So, ten short-duration, ten what we consider regular duration. That’s the six-month crew. And then ten one-year mission. And so, our staff — even though — I can just see the look on some scientists’ faces out there who are used to doing the clinical work, and they do thousands of people. But at NASA, we never have that luxury, right. So, for us, an n of 30 is huge. And so, we’re very excited to have that much data that we can go back and look at.

Host: Very cool. Now, Nikki, when it comes to — talking about this much data, right. You’re obviously trying to pitch to astronauts like, “hey, we got this great integrated study coming up. We want you to participate. We want your — we want you to take part in the preflight, in — during the flight and the post-flight, the whole suite there.” So, what does the participation and planning for that look like from your project management perspective?

Nikki Schwanbeck: So, we have a team of really great people, as Cherie said, behind us. And they help the principal investigators of CIPHER develop an informed consent briefing, which is a short description of what the study wants to look at, what types of tests they’re going to do, and what the risks of some of the tests may be. And then this information is presented to the crew member, and then the crew member can let us know if they’re willing to participate or not. And if they are, they sign a consent form and then we start going through all of the testing, pre-flight, in-flight, post-flight, which for CIPHER starts about nine months prior to when they launch for the duration of the flight and goes out about three years after they land.

Host: Oh, wow. That’s the — yeah, that’s a commitment, for sure. So, what — like what interested me about that was the three years afterwards. So, Steve, back to you for a second. When you’re talking about post-flight, what does that look like? What exactly is meaningful for you to get over the course of that three years?

Steve Platts: Well, one of the most important things is the time course of recovery, right. So, we expect to see things change in space. We expect to see the cardiovascular system change. We expect to see the neurovestibular system change. We expect to see the shape and structure of the eyeball change. And when they come back, we want to see how quickly it comes back to normal. And in just regular space research, that is often the most neglected part of a study. And so, NASA has made a very concerted effort to look at those recovery curves. And three years of recovery, let me tell you, that’s kind of unheard of. You don’t usually get that much recovery data because, you know, a crew member comes back, and they get assigned other duties and they’re busy. But, as I said, you know, they’re making this commitment to do the research for us, so three years is fantastic. And we’ll do multiple data takes. In the early timeframe, the first three months or so, let’s say, it’s probably the most important because that’s where we typically see the most change, right. So, we have to — if their eyeball shape has changed, it comes back, you know, relatively quickly. But then it kind of plateaus out. And the same thing happens with, you know, muscle and heart size. They tend to have the five phasic recovery curves, and so, we’re looking at what that looks like now. This is going to help us get to Mars. And that’s the reason we’re doing it. Because right now, we have a lot of data from shuttle, we have a fair amount of data from six-month missions, and we have, as you said earlier, an end of one, an American crew, for one year. But the Mars Mission is going to take about three. So, if we can get more crew members, more data for that one year, when we’re plotting out and constructing models for what we expect to see, we will have a lot more confidence in predicting what’s likely to happen going to Mars.

Host: I see. So, Nikki, when it comes to the types of missions, right. We talked short duration, standard duration, extended duration. What is that going to look like? Does that — that means, right, we can expect to see some, somewhere, some crew members on the International Space Station very soon conducting one-year missions. I’m curious how those short-duration missions are going to be conducted. So, what are your expectations for the future to get the data you need?

Nikki Schwanbeck: Well, we are working closely with the ISS Program and the Commercial Crew Program to figure out exactly how we are going to enable these missions. There are some technical difficulties that have to be overcome. But, you know, we’re working with them because they’re very supportive of the research that we’re doing because they know, as Steve said, you know, it’s very necessary for us to get to Mars, to get, to understand how the human body changes and how we can make the human body safe and have our crew members still perform at their peak performance on that long three-year mission duration to Mars and back.

Host: Very good. So, let’s go into the disciplines here. Steve, I want to start with you to kick us off. There’s six, I guess, disciplines, and then, I guess — maybe I’m saying it wrong, so feel free to correct me. And then I heard 17 studies, something like that. So, let’s kick off with cardio and vision. What are some of the things we can expect to see?

Steve Platts: Sure. For cardio and vision, we’re looking at how the heart changes with spaceflight. We’re looking at structure, function, shape, its ability to contract. We’re also looking at the blood vessels. We have some evidence that shows that blood vessels tend to get stiffer during spaceflight. And we’re trying to explore that, especially for one-year. But also, for the vision part, we have an issue that is called SANS – Spaceflight Associated Neuro-Ocular Syndrome. And for some astronauts, the shape of their eyeball changes and their vision changes a little bit. And so, that’s a risk that we’re really interested in figuring out. And so, we have a fair amount of studies — well, a fair amount of measurements that we’ll be doing to try and isolate that. And so, again, the time course is going to be very important. We really only discovered that towards the end of the Shuttle Program. So, we don’t have as much shuttle data as we do for other things. So, the short-duration missions will be important for us as well, so we can see that time course.

Host: I see. So, let’s then move on to bone and joint. Actually, from what I have in my notes, Cherie, you are the — you are the person to go through the rest of the disciplines here. So, you want to kick us off with bone and joint?

Cherie Oubre: Sure. Yeah. And this is one of the — a little bit earlier, so I’ll give you a little more information on that. [laughter]. Yeah. So, really, the goal is to look at how the bone changes. Is there loss of mineral balance? Is there loss of strength, the microarchitecture changes, look at cartilage health and how those bone and joints interact. And really, take a broad look at, hey, how did this change, and then how did that re-adaptation happen after those different lengths of mission? And does that re-adaptation happen — that recovery happen a lot slower on those one-year crew? Is that something that you prepare for as we go through those longer missions? So, for bone and joint, there’s a lot of imaging that happens. So, MRI’s, quantitative computed tomography’s. And then, they’re part of that great group that has organized the blood measures, so they’ll do a lot of bone marker analysis as well.

Host: Now, what about muscle physiology? What can we expect there?

Cherie Oubre: Great. We tend to group muscle physiology and egress fitness together just because it’s more as a movement node, a way to do things. So, for muscle physiology, in particular, we’re really looking at aerobic fitness, muscle mass, strength, and endurance changes over the time. So, really, how does that person decondition during flight? Are there changes to the muscle mass? Are they as strong as they were on the ground? And that will give us a clue on how we can help the longer-duration crews. We’re looking at muscle mass losses. Do we have them exercise? Do we have different ways for them to exercise in the future? For egress fitness types of things, really, what happens to the crew during flight? And when they land, how can we help them be able to get out of the capsule? For example, on Mars, and perform the task that they need after they had such a long journey. So, we’re really trying to understand. Once they land, what are they capable of doing, and where do we need to provide assistance in the future?

Host: And what about the vestibular system?

Cherie Oubre: So, great. The vestibular system — the vestibular organs and understanding the changes that happen and how that impacts the crew and their responses. Nobody wants the crew to have that space motion sickness that’s going to impede their ability to function throughout, either the mission and when they return, or when they land on Mars. So, we’re going to assess that system, understand the changes that happen, and look at ways that we may be able to mitigate those changes and help for those future missions.

Host: And, finally, Cherie, to round us off, cognition and behavioral health.

Cherie Oubre: Yeah. So, cognition and behavioral health — it’s kind of what you think of when we say it. So, looking at how the crew member adapts behaviorally to those situations. Looking at, do they have the same sleep duration and quality. What’s the effects on their behavioral performance? And their cognitive performance — if we have them do particular tasks, are they able to do those with the same fidelity early in the mission, mid-mission, or late in the mission as they were before they flew, to make sure that the crew is able to actually perform the tasks that we’re asking them to perform.

Host: Now, Steve, when you’re taking a snapshot at all of these different studies, the thing that’s going through my mind, right, you’re talking about n equals 30, right. So, that’s a lot of folks. I’m thinking to get good data, right, you need probably consistent data, which means you need — what I’m thinking is this is all going to be happening in low-Earth orbit, right. That’s the plan?

Steve Platts: Mm-hmm.

Host: OK.

Steve Platts: Yeah.

Host: Low-Earth orbit. That’s the plan. So, that means the — it is critical for this research to have a continuing platform, right. To continue to use the International Space Station as a place of research and have a good diverse data with several, different mission links to get the data that you need. So, from an HRP perspective, from your Human Research Program, continued access to low-Earth orbit seems to be pretty critical in all this.

Steve Platts: Yeah. It’s actually very important. We do have other analogs here on Earth, but there’s nothing like studying space when you’re in space. And so, that analog which — so, we’re calling the station now an analog for lunar and for Mars, which is kind of funny, right. We’ve always talked about analogs here on Earth. We’ve done some podcasts about, you know, some of our Earth-based analogs for isolation and bedrest and things like — really now, we’re talking about using the space station as an analog and having that available is critical for this experiment. And that’s been a driver for the timing of it as well. To try and get as much of this done before the potential end of space station, or the commercialization of space station. And so, yeah, that’s exactly right. And then, you know, looking forward, we’re also going to utilize, if you will, the lunar surface and Gateway and everything in-between to help us to get to Mars. So, our long-term vision is, you know, exploring the solar system. And so, we’re using everything we can to get there.

Host: Absolutely. Fantastic analogs, right. All these different — that’s even more diverse data than even I’m saying. That’s incredible. Nikki, in the near-term, I’m wondering if you can give us kind of a snapshot of what we can expect in the next year, maybe couple of years. How we can expect to sort of kick off these efforts here in the near term.

Nikki Schwanbeck: So, our team is still working on finalizing the procedures and the training and the very minute details of what goes into it at a project like CIPHER. But we are looking to have that informed consent briefing I mentioned before with our first crew member later this year. And then, hopefully, start doing the study on a crew member that’s launching to the International Space Station next year.

Host: It’s all coming to fruition. This is all coming up here very quickly. Cherie, I wonder if you can share just — you know, it sounds like you’re — you’ve just got a lot of work ahead of you. And there’s even — it sounds like a lot of work behind you. Steve even mentioned four years in the making. He started – handed it off to you. I wonder your level of excitement going into what I — what sounds like will may be the home stretch until you can actually finally kick this off.

Cherie Oubre: Hey, that’s a great way to describe it. The home stretch [laughter]. We’ve put a lot of time doing this integration and working with all these different PIs. And we are really excited to be in a position where we’re looking at, in the next 12 months, being able to start really, working with a crew member that’s going to launch. So, we’re — we feel it’s a great opportunity, and we are going to learn so much about how the human adapts, and the challenges to spaceflight that — we’re very excited to just get started.

Host: Very cool. Now, Steve, I want to end with this. Is — you mentioned a couple of times, you know, gearing up for Mars, preparing for Mars. It sounds like Mars is quite a destination and is a goal. But I’m wondering why? What is so interesting about Mars to put all these efforts on the front-end here, getting all this — you know, using space as — space itself as an analog for what sounds like the ultimate goal is Mars. What’s so interesting about it?

Steve Platts: Well, if you think about it, when you’re growing up and you’re a little kid, and you’re looking up into the night sky, aren’t you looking at the stars and looking at the planets and thinking, “wow, you know, some day.” And the Moon is great, but we’ve been to the Moon, and we’re going back to the Moon. And the next closest planet for us is Mars. And just by human nature, we are explorers. And we have to go. So, you know, if Venus were closer, we’d be trying to circle Venus. If another planet were close — you know, Mars is there. It’s doable. It’s reachable. It’s a challenge. It’s going to take a lot of work, but we can do it. And so, we’re going to do it. And the things we can learn are amazing. If you look over the course of the history of NASA, and all the technologies that have been developed, and all of the benefits to humanity that have been developed, just imagine what will happen going to Mars. Because that’s going to be the hardest yet, right. Getting to the Moon was really hard, especially back in the day when their computers were less powerful than our cellphones. But now, we have even better technology and we can get to Mars. And so, we’re really excited to get there and to actually start studying how that gravity affects the human body, how all of that interaction, that radiation, how will that interact with humans and other components of the station or the vehicle and collecting rock samples and things. It’s just — the amount of science that we can get out of that mission is really just mindboggling. So, it’s very exciting for a NASA person to just contemplate actually setting foot on the Martian surface.

Host: You know, I’m getting a huge sense of excitement and anticipation energy from all three of you. And, Steve, you mentioned just — you know, excitement at NASA. But, really, I think what’s cool here is that this integrated study involves so many different people, right. Extends even beyond NASA. And I think it’s a — it’s a wonderful way to bring everyone together and study what sounds like one thing, but it’s everybody kind of doing their own thing as part of a — as one big effort as we continue to explore the cosmos. What a wonderful way to end this. Cherie, Steve, and Nikki, thank you so much for coming on Houston We Have A Podcast today. What a fascinating and engaging conversation we had. Really appreciate your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Steve Platts: Thank you.

Cherie Oubre: Thank you.

Nikki Schwanbeck: Thank you.

[ Music]

Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Cherie, Steve, and Nikki as much as I did. They were all very excited to share some of their work coming up here very, very soon. And there’s a lot to learn. You can check out more of their efforts at NASA.gov/hrp if you’re interested. Or if you’re a researcher and you want to get in on the action here. They’re going to be doing this for quite a long time, so there’s a lot to — a lot of opportunities here. If you want to learn more about stuff on the International Space Station or Artemis or some of our Mars plans, we have done a number of episodes on all things human spaceflight and all different, I guess, places in space, right. Low-Earth orbit, Mars, the Moon. We’ve talked about it all. You can check us out and other NASA podcasts. You can check us all out at NASA.gov/podcasts. We are taking ideas all the time, and love when you participate with us on social media. So, we’re on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you have a suggestion or a question for us, just use the hashtag #AskNASA on your favorite platform, and you can submit an idea or maybe ask a question, whatever you want. Just make sure to mention it’s for us at Houston We Have a Podcast. We’ll get back to you. This episode was recorded on February 26, 2021. Thanks to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Norah Moran, Belinda Pulido, Jennifer Hernandez, Brett Redden, and Jenny Turner. Thanks again to Dr. Cherie Oubre, Dr. Steve Platts, and Nikki Schwanbeck for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on and tell us what you think of our podcast. We’ll be back next week.