My guest this week is Gernot Groemer, the founder of the Austrian Space Forum, which does things like organizing analog Mars missions, conducting space research, and building cubesats. Gernot also has his own popular science TV show in Austria.

This will also be the first episode where we will try something new:

We have regularly received follow-up questions from listeners and have been answering them ad-hoc. We now want to open this up to everybody: so, if you do have questions about the episode, please email them to us at [email protected]. We will do our best to answer them all and if there is one that we judge of high general interest to all listeners, we will answer it on the next episode as well as on our Twitter.

Check out The Austrian Space Forum here.

Check out Gernot's science TV show here. (in German)

The Space Business Podcast is sponsored by NanoAvionics and produced in partnership with the International Space University (ISU). Follow the podcast on Twitter @podcast_space

If you got interested in learning more about the business opportunities in space, check out my online course at https://www.udemy.com/course/space-entrepreneurship/

If you speak German, also check out my recently published introductory book on the space economy.

Episode notes:

0:00 Intro

3:00 Space in Austria

5:15 What is the Austrian Space Forum and who can join it

10:51 Collaborations with students

11:52 Analog Mars missions

16:35 Psychology research during analog missions

18:00 Typical duration of an analog mission

19:06 Simulating restricted access to food and other mundane things

21:48 What kind of scientific experiments are analog astronauts conducting?

23:55 Robot usage in the analog missions

24:38 Handling limited expertise in experiments

27:22 What kind of people are good for missions and what kind of people apply?

33:38 The next analog mission 

38:35 Other Forum projects

43:29 Apply to the Austrian Space Forum

43:47 Gernot's science TV show

47:26 What excites Gernot most about space at the moment?

48:29 Sci-fi