The podcast by project managers for project managers. Lessons learned from a space crop production project to develop sustainable fresh food systems, in support of long duration space missions beyond low Earth orbit. We’re exploring the world of astrobotany and the challenges of this unconventional project.

Table of Contents

02:38 … Meet Ralph05:05 … Project Management Role at NASA08:30 … Space Crop Production09:44 … Project Stakeholders11:35 … Tailoring the Pitch12:39 … Growing Plants in Space16:46 … Plant Growth Substrate19:16 … Regolith23:15 … Types of Plant Crops for Space27:42 … Kevin and Kyle29:09 … Understanding Both Sides of the Project33:34 … Further Testing36:15 … Project Simulation Funding37:59 … Making the Most of Opportunities40:51 … PM Lessons Learned43:26 … Find out More44:34 … Closing

RALPH FRITSCHE: I think it’s an advantage not having too much of a foothold in any camp because what it does is you bring a bias with you that you have to work through.  Not having that bias gives you the ability to understand the passions that each side brings to the table and to try to balance those.  Because personalities are such that I might have an engineer who’s very knowledgeable and demonstrative, and they may override the plant scientist person.  And you have to be able to see that dynamic if it happens and try to balance that out.  So it’s really almost acting like an orchestra leader trying to understand when the right time to engage one group versus another.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Hello, and welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Thank you for joining us today.  This is where we interview top experts and project managers to get their unique perspectives.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and joining me is Bill Yates, who likes to dig deep into complex issues that project managers face today.  If you like what you hear, we’d love to hear from you.  You can leave us a comment on our website, Velociteach.com, on social media, or whichever podcast listening app you use.

Our guest today is Ralph Fritsche.  He is with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which we commonly call NASA; and he’s a space crop production and exploration food systems project manager.  And he’s leading the efforts to develop sustainable and reliable fresh food systems in support of long-duration space missions beyond low Earth orbit.

BILL YATES:  This is so fascinating.  This conversation with Ralph is just something I’ve been looking forward to because, I mean, Wendy, you and I, neither one of us are really green thumbs.  We can kill stuff.

WENDY GROUNDS:  No, no, I’m really bad.  I’ve been trying so hard.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  And here we’re going to talk with Ralph about growing stuff in space.  And it has to be edible, and it has to be the ultimate in terms of nutritious and tasty and sustainable and zero waste.  It’s like, ah, what a problem to solve, and what an interesting project to address.

WENDY GROUNDS:  It’s such an interesting project because we spoke to Philippe Schoonejans a few months ago, and he was telling us it can take over eight months to get to Mars.  So it’s not like you can stop midway and resupply and get your fruit and veggies.  So Ralph’s team is trying to develop sustainable fresh food systems for these astronauts.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  And Ralph’s had a 40-year career with NASA.  He’s done a little bit of everything, and he mentions a few of those in our conversation.  But talking about this latest project challenge for him is just mind-blowing.

Meet Ralph

WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Ralph.  Welcome to Manage This.  We’re so glad you’re joining us.

RALPH FRITSCHE:  Thank you very much.  Pleasure to be here.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Before we get talking about astrobotany, and I’m so geeked out about that, I want to find out a little bit about you.  Can you tell us about your career path?  Have you always been interested in space?

RALPH FRITSCHE:  So, you know, it’s interesting, when I look back over it, I never envisioned or planned to be working in the space industry or on a space program.  But there are all these things that I can look back on my life that popped up that kind of probably said I was always destined to be here.  One of the first recollections I have, when I was a kid, I was doing one of these pencil-by-number paintings that they had back in the ‘60s, and it was of Ed White walking in space.  I was actually doing that when I heard about the Apollo fire that he died in.  Then I would follow all the other space missions, the early Gemini and even Mercury missions, Apollo.

And so I was always interested in it.  But at the time I lived up in the New York area, eventually moved to Florida, right by the Space Coast.  And then I was interested at the time.  I went to college for physics and space sciences.  But always more from a cosmology perspective, not for human interaction in space.  But then being so close to the Space Center, when the time came to graduate, that’s where the jobs were.  And I got into it.  And I’ve been working at the Space Center or on some aspect of space program-related things for the past 40 years, everything from early space shuttle flights, went through most of the space shuttle program, up through ISS, International Space Station, the assembly of that.

It was probably one of the highlights for me because I got to travel all over.  We worked with the Europeans on the Columbus module.  So we got to go to Europe several times.  Worked with the Japanese on the JEM module, got to go to Japan.  Before we actually built the station we worked with the docking module that allowed the space shuttle to dock to the Russian Mir station and got to travel to Moscow.  You know, I’ve got all these experiences that I likely would not have had otherwise.  But the interesting thing is where I’ve wound up now and working in crop production and plants.  Trying to feed astronauts in exploration missions turns out to be probably really the most interesting thing I’ve done from the practical perspective of helping humanity reach out beyond low-Earth orbit into the solar system.

Project Management Role at NASA

WENDY GROUNDS:  Explain your project management role at NASA.

RALPH FRITSCHE:  Again, interesting.  We started off with, once we built Space Station, our group changed, and we began doing a series of research payloads.  So basically we transitioned from building Space Station to using it.  And so they were smaller research payloads, and they were space biology-related payloads.  Generally the way things are broken out within the science mission directorate and the biological physical sciences program is that plants are focused out of the Kennedy Space Center; animals are out of the Ames Research Center.

So our stuff has always been focused on plants, microbes, things like that.  The small research facilities were generally things that were either a standard facility that we developed for multiple applications or unique one-off hardware packages.  And then we would work with principle investigators to make sure that we could match their experiments to the right hardware, or build hardware if needed, and then take that hardware all the way through the verification process and get it to fly in the International Space Station.  So they were very compartmentalized payloads that we would work a couple of years on each one, and then you pick up the next one.

And then one day we were told that one of our funding sources was interested in doing space crop production.  We had grown plants on the Veggie payload.  We were getting ready to fly the Advanced Plant Habitat, another plant payload.  But the whole term of “crop production,” we weren’t really sure what that was at the time.  And I don’t think the asking people really understood, either.  But we knew there needed to be a role for plants beyond research into an application to feeding crew.  And so I was basically given that moniker before we really understood what it all involved.

And now it’s kind of transitioned into trying to work a roadmap for the food systems for exploration to see where can plants play a viable role for keeping astronauts healthy and safe on these long-duration missions.  Really when you look at it, food’s the first line of defense for crew health.  And we know that when I start getting further away from Earth on the longer duration missions to Mars, for example, the prepackaged food that we have now starts to degrade in certain key nutrients after about 18 months.  And so we’re looking at three-year missions.  So the challenge is how do I supplement the crew diet with the kind of nutrition that they need, also doing other things like adding flavor, textures to the diet.  And so plants are really, probably I would say, the most known commodity for doing something in space.

There’s a lot of different technologies that are still being developed, synthetic biology, things like that.  But they require a lot more infrastructure.  We kind of know how to basically grow plants now with all our practice in low Earth orbit.  And it’s now how do I move this into deep space environment, and how do I figure out what types of missions are going to require this supplemental nutrition?  What would those key nutrients be, so what plants do I grow?  So it’s really time to lay a long-term roadmap out there, see where do we do the research that’s needed, where do we deploy the systems, et cetera.  So it’s kind of a big range thinking out the next 30 to 50 years.

Space Crop Production

BILL YATES:  The complexity here just blows me away.  And just for a human to reach Mars takes so long.  So to your point, then, okay, we have meals that have an expiration date.  Okay, what are we going to do once they get there and do some work and then come home?  You know, they have to have food to eat.  This is so complex.