Host Nick Hennen sits down with Pacific Northwest National Lab’s Ryan McClure. Ryan is involved in a NASA-funded project with PNNL to blast soil laden with bacteria to the International Space Station.

The bacteria-infused soil is from Prosser, Wash. Researchers like McClure and Janet Jansson, a laboratory fellow at PNNL and the leader of the study, will look at what the bacteria do in a microgravity environment to learn more about how soil microbial communities function in space. That’s the intelligence scientists need to grow food in space or on another celestial body.

If you’d like to follow the mission’s progress and launch, you can do so here: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/launch/spacex.html or https://www.nasa.gov/spacex.