About the Roadmap
This EBRC technical research roadmap, Engineering Biology for Space Health, provides a detailed evaluation of opportunities for engineering biology to improve human health and well-being during space exploration missions and help solve societal challenges here on Earth. Keeping humans alive on ever-longer and ever-further missions into space will require the sustainable production and access to food, new and more efficient and effective health and medicine capabilities, and enabling and ensuring resources to support life and control the local environment, particularly when those resources are limited. This roadmap is intended to guide technical research and development, investment, and programmatic decisions into engineering biology tools and technologies that will help overcome the challenges of extended space travel.
The roadmap has been created through the contributions of over 100 diverse stakeholders with broad scientific expertise, including academic and industry experts, government leaders, and exceptional trainees. The planning, production, and publication of this roadmap was led by the science policy experts at the Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC) along with the leadership of the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH). Three in-person workshops were held for content development, with additional virtual workshops to further edit and refine the roadmap’s content.
The roadmap serves to provide a diverse audience, including the research community, burgeoning private space industry, government funders, and policy experts, with an inclusive, but not exhaustive, landscape of potential engineering biology advancements towards solving known and anticipated challenges facing human health and well-being in space. The roadmap consists of five cascading Elements in three overarching themes: Health & Medicine, Food & Nutrition, and Environmental Control & Life Support. This roadmap’s broad Goals are delineated by Breakthrough Capabilities to which engineering biology can directly contribute. The Breakthrough Capabilities are broken down into short-, medium-, and long-term milestones for engineering biology advancement, each with relevant technical bottlenecks and potential solutions. This Element structure makes the roadmap accessible to audiences with different levels of technical expertise or topical interest. The roadmap also includes a Fictional Narrative and a contextual Glossary to help orient readers.
Each field of science and engineering will have its own advancements and approaches to the challenges discussed in this roadmap, and the tools and technologies identified here are only a small portion of possible solutions to advance human health during long-term spaceflight. Advances in other disciplines must be supported and researchers should remain actively engaged in a way that fosters multi-disciplinary collaboration. The ethical and social considerations of the tools and technologies described in this roadmap and beyond should be meaningfully incorporated at the early stages of research, including proper training for researchers to consider potential ethical, security, and legal implications from the start. The opportunities described in this roadmap are only a small part of a broader body of work, but present the great potential engineering biology holds for future advancements in space health.
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Recommended Citation: Engineering Biology Research Consortium (2024). Engineering Biology for Space Health: An Innovative Research Roadmap. Retrieved from https://roadmap.ebrc.org. doi: 10.25498/E4D59R
This material is based upon work supported by the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at the Baylor College of Medicine (NASA Cooperative Agreement NNX16AO69A) under award #INN0013. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of NASA, the Translational Research Institute for Space Health, or Baylor College of Medicine.
Last updated: October 22, 2024