Growing Life Beyond Earth: Dr. Marshall Porterfield on Space Biology and the Artemis III Mission

Welcome to LaunchPod, where we chat with innovators who are overcoming challenges, pushing boundaries, and collaborating to make space more accessible and sustainable for humanity—one launch at a time, one small step for man. Here’s your host, Susan Wise.

Susan Wise:
Hi, and welcome to Stars LaunchPod: Space Technology and Research Sciences, brought to you by starsciences.org, where we connect, collaborate, and accelerate. I’m your host, Susan Wise, and joining us is Dr. Marshall Porterfield, a professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University. His research focuses on biosensors, bionanotechnology, and space biology.

Hi, and welcome to the show.

Marshall Porterfield:
Hi Susan. Thanks so much for having me here today.

Susan Wise:
It’s great to talk to you! We’d like to learn a little bit more about you, and also hear what you’re working on right now to help further the space industry.

Marshall Porterfield:
Well, my main project right now is actually building a mission payload experiment that’ll fly on Artemis III to be deployed on the lunar surface. Our experiment is called the LEAF experiment—Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora.

We’ll be cultivating several different plant species on the lunar surface. There’ll also be a return module that will bring some of the plants back to Earth for analysis. We’ll study gene expression changes during spaceflight to understand how plants respond to the lunar radiation environment. Then, we’ll share that information with researchers back on Earth to help us understand the challenges we’ll face when we go to the Moon.

Susan Wise:
You know, we want to be able to make our own food while we’re in space—on the Moon, Mars, or wherever we end up.

Marshall Porterfield:
Well, we’re going to have to if those kinds of missions are going to be viable. We really don’t know much about the radiation environment beyond LEO—Low Earth Orbit.

People often think that 20 years of research on the ISS has solved all the problems of going beyond LEO—but it hasn’t. One of the reasons is that the ISS is protected by the Van Allen belts at its orbital inclination. That shielding is great—it allows people to spend six months or a year at a time on the ISS—but we’re nowhere near ready to support humans on long-term lunar surface missions.

Only 19 people have ever been outside the Van Allen belts for any length of time—and those were the Apollo astronauts, decades ago. So we still have a lot to learn about that radiation environment and how to protect crew health.

In some ways, the plants will serve as a biological analog system—something we can really study in depth to understand what’s happening in that spaceflight environment.

Susan Wise:
Out of curiosity, for Artemis, what kinds of plants are you testing? What are we going to eat?

Marshall Porterfield:
We’re flying Arabidopsis and Brassica species—Brassica is where we get grapeseed oil from. There’s also a lot of interest in working with duckweed because it has high protein content and is very productive. We’d like to include that too if possible.

We’re still building the payload and working through the challenges of conducting an experiment within the lunar exploration architecture—it’s very different from doing work on the ISS.

Susan Wise:
When you mentioned challenges, what was one of your biggest challenges, and how did you overcome it?

Marshall Porterfield:
One of the biggest challenges in my career was during my time at NASA Headquarters, when we were standing up GeneLab. What we were doing was so different—it changed how we approached research in space.

At the time, there was a lot of pushback from the scientific community. Many didn’t understand how GeneLab would enable future researchers. But since then, GeneLab has supported a large number of meta-analyses that let us revisit previous spaceflight experiments and pool the results.

GeneLab acts as a clearinghouse for transcriptomics and genomics data, allowing us to advance systems biology significantly. While it was hard to get the scientific community to adopt these new standards at first, the outcome has been transformational—it’s opened up new opportunities and a deeper understanding of what’s happening in space.

Susan Wise:
That’s exciting! What was one of your “aha” moments—when you thought, “Yes, this is it!”?

Marshall Porterfield:
I’ve had several over the years. One of my main focuses—since my early Arabidopsis work during the shuttle era—has been mitochondrial stress in root systems. I became fascinated with mitochondrial biophysics and have been developing sensor technologies to study it.

The meta-analysis results from GeneLab have provided some of my biggest “aha” moments—because predictions we made 20 years ago about the biophysics of the spaceflight environment are now being validated.

When you can reanalyze and pool all previous spaceflight data—sometimes from experiments with very different goals—you begin to see consistent patterns emerge. Those large meta-studies have reinforced what we know about mitochondrial stress and biophysics. Even on the human side, mitochondrial stress is a major driver of biomedical challenges in spaceflight.

Susan Wise:
These experiments apply not just to astronauts but also to Earth-based applications, right?

Marshall Porterfield:
Absolutely. The two main initiatives I started at NASA Headquarters were GeneLab and, on the human medical side, the Twins Study, which was our first major step into human genomics.

Those efforts laid the groundwork for precision medicine. When you think about critical missions with only a few individuals, precision health is essential—it lets us tailor medical support systems based on an astronaut’s personal genome. And that’s the same direction medicine is moving here on Earth.

Susan Wise:
Mm-hmm.

Marshall Porterfield:
We’ll be pioneering that approach at the frontiers of space exploration. Like many NASA technologies, it will have significant spinoffs here on Earth.

Susan Wise:
Right—what works up there often benefits us down here.

Marshall Porterfield:
Exactly. The problems we face in space are the same as the ones we face on Earth—they’re just magnified.

Susan Wise:
What’s one piece of advice you’d like to share with our listeners today?

Marshall Porterfield:
Well, depending on your background—especially if you’re a student—I’d say: focus on physics as a foundation for biology. It’s vital to understand physical and chemical principles, especially in this new era of space exploration.

We’ll be relying heavily on genomics and systems-level data, but we also need functional analysis tools—sensing, simulation, and modeling.

If you think about it, there’s a new “moon race”—the real race is to build the first base on the Moon. That race has been going on for 80 years, though we’ve slowed down and lost focus at times. Maybe we should have concentrated more on exploration goals rather than just commercialization. We’ve lost momentum by not keeping humans-in-space exploration as our primary driver.

Susan Wise:
When you look at the technology we have now compared to back then…

Marshall Porterfield:
Right. We have decades of experience with ISS systems, many of which were inherited from the Russian program. If we hadn’t collaborated with the Russians at a critical time, we wouldn’t have made the progress we did with our space station programs.

Still, we haven’t done as much as we could with the ISS in developing countermeasures for human health. One major gap remains logistics—how will we grow food, provide life support, and use biological systems sustainably in space? Those are the critical questions we still need to answer.

Susan Wise:
Of course. And what about water and moisture recovery—getting that from the air? What do they say? “Yesterday’s coffee is today’s coffee,” right?

Marshall Porterfield:
(Laughs) Yes, exactly. We’ll have to recycle waste—it’s essential.

One problem with the ISS water system is that, while it uses great technology, the consumables required for recycling actually create more up-mass than if we just launched fresh water. So, we’re looking at using waste materials and potentially lunar regolith to help.

For example, we’re exploring how to 3D-print bioceramics—materials made from waste streams and lunar dust—that could serve as water filters. Essentially, we’re making lunar ceramics.

Susan Wise:
I love it.

Marshall Porterfield:
That’s how we’re going to colonize the Moon.

Susan Wise:
Hey, if it works, I like it! Dr. Porterfield, before we wrap up, do you have a passion project—past or present—you’d like to mention?

Marshall Porterfield:
Yes. I’m really focused on developing single-mitochondrion recordings. I want to study mitochondrial systems the same way we study single cells today. I think that’s one of the most critical frontiers in biology.

Susan Wise:
That’s very exciting, and we’ll be following your work closely. We’re looking forward to Artemis III! That’s coming up in February, right?

Marshall Porterfield:
It’s currently scheduled for 2027 for Artemis III.

Susan Wise:
2027—okay! That’s exciting. We’ll be watching and learning. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us today.

Marshall Porterfield:
Thank you, Susan. I really enjoyed getting the chance to talk with you and your audience.

Susan Wise:
Be sure to join us as we connect, collaborate, and accelerate—and don’t forget to visit starsciences.org. Get a free one-year membership by entering the promo code FRIENDS321.

If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review and subscribe.