In 1998, my colleagues and I watched from the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center as one of our experiments rocketed into orbit on the Space Shuttle Columbia. It was thrilling to know that astronauts would be caring for these plants, and doing experiments — our experiments from UF — that would help us better understand life in space. Over the years, we have sent 15 more experiments to space, and the thrill is still there every time.
There are hundreds of scientists and scholars here at UF who are just like us. Their research ranges from the empirical — how to grow plants or design new pharmaceuticals in space — to the abstract — how does space exploration impact human ethics, culture and imagination. Until now, we’ve each worked in our own disciplines and only learned about each other by chance. After all, our various disciplines are spread across UF’s 16 colleges and a dozen professional societies. There has been no real structure at UF to collaborate on space research in ways that would be useful to science, to industry and, indeed, to humanity.
