Short Wave - The Microbiologist Studying The Giant Floating Petri Dish In Space

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

Microbiologist Monsi Roman joined NASA in 1989 to help design the International Space Station. As the chief microbiologist for life support systems on the ISS, Roman was tasked with building air and water systems to support crews in space. That meant predicting how microbes would behave and preventing them from disrupting missions. And so, on today's show, host Aaron Scott talks to Roman about microbes in space: the risks they pose and where they might take us in the future of space travel. Questions about the science happening around you? Email [e-mail] — we'd love to hear about it!See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Mansou Raman started working for NASA in 1989 to help design something they'd never done before, the International Space Station. Up to that point, U.S. missions have been short enough that astronauts could take along enough clean air and water to get through the flight. They told us our job was to basically design air and water systems for a crew that would stay up to six months up in space in low Earth orbit. and that they were going to recycle water and air. So it was like, this is really funny. We'll see if we can make that work. Monty had moved to the U.S. a couple years earlier from Puerto Rico

to get a master's degree in microbial ecology. And now she was the chief microbiologists for life support systems on a space station. Although as it would turn out, planning for how the biology of tiny microbes would affect the station, Menchu is going to spend a lot of time investigating human biology. For the first time, we were going to be recycling the water for the crew to drink. And when I mean recycling, we were going to be using the urine. At that time, we're also looking at the recycling of the shower water and the humidity condensate to return back to the crew for drinking.

But the urine was the one that took everybody's breath away, like, oh, my gosh, you know, we're going to be drinking water, recycle from urine. You know, that is pretty nasty. So there's a lot of microbiological implications of a system like that. The first thing they had to figure out was what sort of microbes were going to grow in tanks full of urine and condensed sweat. Perhaps not surprisingly, there was not a lot of research on this subject. So we enrolled a bunch of people working in our NASA Center to come and donate urine

and humidity condensate and things like that that we needed. And then we did the analysis ourselves to find out what things were in there. Figuring this out wasn't just about cleaning the water. Microbiologists were starting to learn about a new threat called biofilms, or communities of microbes that grow together on surfaces and that can potentially break down those surfaces, which if you're floating in a tiny metal can in the vacuum of space could mean the difference between life and death.

In the MIR space station, which also was a rushes, Space Station, we have starting to hear rumors that the bacteria was starting to attach to the epoxy on the window of their station, and it was starting to eat the material. To the engineers on the team, the solution was simple, make the entire space station almost sterile. And so that was kind of like a joke for us, the microbiologists, because it was like almost sterile, it's like almost pregnant. You're either pregnant or you're not pregnant, you know, so you're either sterile, which means

no microorganisms or not? And the microbiologists knew that if you are going to have humans, you are going to have microorganisms. So the question became, What kind of organisms can we accept in the atmosphere or in our water, right? So how many of them? You know, which ones are the important ones to keep an eye on? They also tested out what sort of materials they should use

and what humidity and temperature they should keep everything at to discourage microbial growth. Plus, how to keep things clean, like vacuuming out floating food particles from the air filters. In the beginning, Monce says figuring out all these systems and how they would all work together to keep the astronauts alive was like a detective game. We were very lucky back then that we had the opportunity

to have an immense laboratory where we can do any testing we wanted to do. But as the launch drew closer, the pressure, mountain. It was time to stop all that and just go ahead and build the equipment and then literally stopped breathing ourselves when all those systems were turned on in space because by the time they were turned on,

we actually had people there, right? And so the air systems were that important, right? And then, of course, when they started drinking for the first time. The Expedition 19 crew inaugurating the use of the water recovery system. That was an amazing thing. And here we go. And here's to you guys and here's to everybody who made this all happen. Today on the show, we close out Latinx Heritage Month by talking with the trailblazing microbiologist Monci Romon about microbes in space and all the risk and potential they pose for future exploration. I'm Aaron Scott. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

When Monsey started working on the space station, the term microbiome wasn't yet widely used. But the idea that there were these diverse colonies of bacteria, fungi, and other tiny organisms living in any environment was understood, at least by microbiologists. And that meant that the very first living things to reside on the International Space Station were not astronauts. They were microbes. It's just like walking inside your house or walking inside a building. There's microorganisms everywhere. And then people started coming in, right? And not only people, people from all over there.

world, eating all kinds of different food. Mm-hmm. With the food also came all kinds of other things. Basically, the space station became a giant floating petri dish in low Earth orbit. And the funny thing is that each astronaut comes up with their own microflora, right? When they come down, they have already shared their microorganisms. So not necessarily a bad thing at all. It's just something that happens if you're in an enclosed, you know, environment.

with somebody very close, you probably are sharing a lot of your microbes. So it's kind of like this space station develops its own microbiome that all the astronauts share and bring back to Earth. That is correct. And that is one of the biggest conundrums, I guess I'm going to call it, on how we're going to deal with the future long-term exploration missions to Mars and beyond, because you do not want to completely clean it up. Number one, we know we cannot sterilize it, right?

And then number two is how much is good enough? Because you want to also keep your immune system challenge, right? Let's just put an example, the pandemic right now. Everybody stayed home. Everybody wore a mask, pretty much, you know. So when everybody got exposed back to everybody else, they started getting sick, right? Uh-huh. Because your immune system was, you kept it, you know, pretty contained.

So, you know, for exploration, now we have to figure out how much is too much. And more important, you know, which ones of those microorganisms we do not want at all, which ones of those we want to control, and how we control just a few, not all of them, you know, it's going to be a very interesting exercise on trying to figure out all those things, to keep our astronauts, you know, healthy enough or when they land, they can do their mission. Monsey says it's a balancing act. And in the 25 years since the station launched, they've managed to make it work. Once in a while, we would see something on a wall.

wall, for example, on the Russian part of the station, they had a wall that, where they, for some reason, the Russians will hang towels that were wet after exercising, and eventually those walls started growing mold. So that's something that had to be dealt with pretty early in the station. Other than that, they has not been reported any major issues in the station related to microorganisms. And so no microbes growing on like the epoxy on the windows the way that they had in the Russian space station? That is correct, right? It is going to be interesting to watch how things, you know, evolve because one of the things we do know about microorganisms, they adapt very, very easily, right? So things that we might not predict might happen because they might be put in a position of having to use epoxy, for example, to survive because otherwise they're going to die.

So one or two survive that, they mutate, because bacteria mutates all the time. That's nothing terrible. It's something that happens all the time on Earth everywhere. So it's just going to be something to watch. This is the beauty of station or anything that we do. It is about learning, continuously learning. So the field has come a very, very long ways, but still has so much distance to go. Yes.

Yes, yes. And as we start evolving from a NASA-based space station to commercial space stations, which is what I am currently working, to start that transition in station and in long exploration missions, and especially in planetary missions, we're going to have to get very creative and very good about using what is it that we have available to us. So we don't continue to bring other things, right? And the possibility of learning not to pollute those places that we visit, or the stations or the spacecraft that we're in, right?

So making sure they're stayed clean, making sure that we recycle, reuse, and repurpose everything, almost 100%, right? A lot of that, you know, in many areas that are going to be affected by microbes because now you can also see the power of microorganisms helping us perhaps recycling, you know? and so using microorganisms in ways that, you know, before they were our enemy, now they are our friends, you know, to decompose certain materials that before we couldn't do, right? So all those things are incredibly exciting to me because now we're not only trying to control the microorganisms that could make people sick, but also use them for the right things to make life better there and here on the ground too. It's been a lot of fun to talk microbes in space with you. Thank you for joining us.

It has been a pleasure. I will die in microbiologists. It doesn't matter what I ever do. I'm always, you know, that's, yeah. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, edited by our managing producer, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Anil Oza. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthor, and we'd like to thank Andy Huther as well. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Anya Grunman.

is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Aaron Scott. Thank you, as always, for listening to Shortwave from NPR.