Fueling your space exploration with Dr. Aaron Persad
In this episode we talk to Dr. Aaron Persad, CTO and Cofounder of Mission: Space Food.
Dr. Aaron is a research engineer and scientist in Space Sciences and Technology with 15+ years of experience in the field. He has designed and built two experiments that were launched to the International Space Station to study how fluids behave in low gravity. Currently, Dr. Persad is CTO and co-founder of Mission: Space Food. He is also Director of Bioastronautics at the International Institute of Astronautical Sciences, where he leads spacesuit validation/verification testing in microgravity. Dr. Persad is also a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is developing novel membrane-based separation/filtration systems. Previously, he was manager for reduced gravity parabolic flight campaigns for the Canadian Space Agency.
As humans inevitably start looking into their long-term future as a spacefaring civilization. One of the pillars of human life — eating — becomes an increasingly important field of multidisciplinary innovation to be able to support life outside of Earth. At the same time, humans have woken up to the fact that the current food systems on Earth are deeply flawed, becoming the primary contributors to the increased rate of climate change and ecosystem degradation, putting all life under existential risk.
With an increased interest and investment into going back to the Moon, settling on Mars, and the rise of Space Tourism, the International Space Station (ISS) serves as a platform to prototype the most efficient food systems and meals in microgravity that are both delicious, resource-efficient, nutritious, and sustainable. By re-imagining astronaut food on the ISS, Mission: Space Food creates eating experiences to address the public health and ecological constraints on earth, seeding the eating rituals and flavors for centuries to come.
Mission Space Food are a commercial space startup re-imaging space food systems, by combining space sciences and experiential design to fuel your exploration, starting with multivitamin supplements.
If you’d like to learn more about Mission Space Food and Dr. Persad’s work, please refer to the links below:
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