UF scientist Rob Ferl completes historic space mission

University of Florida scientist Rob Ferl took a giant leap for research Thursday when he became the first NASA-funded university researcher to conduct his own experiments in space during a flawless sub-orbital mission on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.

New Shepard lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 8:07 a.m. Central Daylight Time and climbed to an altitude of 345,958 feet, well above the Karman Line, the internationally recognized boundary of space. Ferl and his five fellow crew members experienced several minutes of weightlessness before their capsule returned to Earth, touching down softly in a plume of dust under three orange and blue parachutes.

Ferl raised his arms in celebration as he exited the capsule, donned a bright orange UF cap and went to greet his waiting family.

“It couldn’t have been a better experience,” Ferl said a few minutes later. “There is room for scientists of all sizes, shapes and ages to do this. There is a lot of opportunity in a ride like that.”

Ferl, a distinguished professor in UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, then joined his long-time collaborator, fellow UF Professor Anna-Lisa Paul, in preparing the experimental tubes he had activated during the flight for their trip back to an on-site lab and, ultimately, to Gainesville for analysis.

“What a glorious day for the University of Florida, Rob, Anna-Lisa, and their team,” said Interim UF President Kent Fuchs. “UF is tremendously proud to pioneer a new era of space exploration where academics conduct their own research in space. Our partnership with Blue Origin and NASA is an important first for university scientists around the world. Discoveries lie ahead.” 

Ferl, who is also director of UF’s Astraeus Space Institute, and Paul have sent dozens of experiments to space over the last 20 years in an effort to understand how living organisms respond, at the molecular level, to launch, microgravity and return to Earth. Typically, those experiments have involved plants loaded into complex, largely self-sufficient payload packages managed by NASA astronauts. Paul, director of UF’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research, said these experiments have largely been done “in space” but not “on the way to space.”

“Academic researchers have had a wonderful collaborative relationship with NASA astronauts over the years,” Ferl said. “Now, the growth of the commercial space industry provides new opportunities for us scientists to conduct our own very focused, real-time experiments.”

This project is funded by a grant from NASA’s Flight Opportunities program in the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate as well as the Biological and Physical Sciences division in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. UF’s ability to leverage space capabilities like Blue Origin’s with NASA’s support opens up a new era of space research, where scientists like Ferl are able to conduct their own experiments in space. 

For Thursday’s mission, Ferl carried experimental plants in specially designed tubes attached to his flight suit that he activated at four different points during the trip to space and back: prior to launch, upon reaching microgravity, at the end of the weightless period as the vehicle began its descent, and upon landing.

At the Payload Processing Facility on the ground, lab manager Jordan Callaham tracked his progress and activated a set of control tubes at the same time. Paul said the hours of training the team did in preparation for the mission was invaluable.

“The astronaut did a fantastic job and it enabled us to coordinate the ground control very precisely,” she said. “The plants all looked really great. We have a perfectly paired experiment.”

Ferl and Paul helped design the tubes, called Kennedy Space Center Fixation Tubes, or KFTs, to quickly and safely mix test materials (in this case, a model plant called Arabidopsis thaliana) and preservative solutions to “fix” a moment of gene expression so researchers can later study what was happening at that moment. KFTs have also been used on the space station to safely and effectively handle solutions in a microgravity environment. Find more details about the experiment here. 

“The successful use of KFTs enables a wide range of biological experiments in suborbital space, as any biology that can fit inside the KFTs can be sampled at any phases of flight chosen, in real time, by the scientist astronaut,” Paul said.