Dr. Pete Worden, director of NASA Ames Research Center, welcomes you to a weekend workshop co-sponsored by the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative to develop ideas that demonstrate the potential role of synthetic biology in NASA's mission. NASA's mission is broadly defined: "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research". The goal of this workshop is to understand if synthetic biology can provide a more efficient, lower cost, practical approach to specific challenges in space. You will be interacting with NASA experts experienced in the science and engineering of space missions and those from outside of NASA involved in basic and applied synthetic biology. Participants at the meeting will work to define a future research agenda for synthetic biology within NASA.

Applications:

Biology on Earth readily demonstrates that life is an efficient user of resources around it, turning those resources into habitats, materials and forms that perform various functions. Synthetic biology in space represents a new challenge, the challenge of designing organisms to perform reliable functions that an astronaut may one day depend on. If the promise of an engineerable biology on Earth is within reach, then we ask you to think about what applications may be possible with synthetic biology in space. Please submit abstracts that, if chosen, could lead to full papers demonstrating a quantitative analysis of how synthetic biology could be tailored to meet a specific application need, such as, but not limited to:

1. Biomaterials, self-building habitats
2. Biomining and the purification of metals and minerals
3. Food production, nutritious and palatable
4. Fuel production, renewable chemicals
5. Biosensors
6. Light production
7. Waste processing
8. Enrichment of lunar, martian, asteroidal regolith as plant soil
9. Hybrid systems of physical, chemical and biological systems.
10. Other specific applications where biology can save costs, launch mass, reliability or time.

We also welcome abstracts on these general topics (more details)

1. How can synthetic biology help NASA achieve its mission?
2. Why take synthetic biology to space?
3. What new scientific questions arise from combining synthetic biology and space?
4. How can synthetic biology help us understand the origin and nature of life on Earth to inform our search for life in the Universe.
5. How does space synthetic biology pick up on the broader synthetic biology agenda?
6. How can biology become a robust, reliable technology?
7. What new engineering and practical challenges arise?
8. How does biology compete or augment chemical, physical and thermal in situ resource utilization (ISRU) processes?
9. How does the commercial viability of resources on Earth and space change with more reliable biological manufacturing processes?
10. What are the broader ethical and societal implications of engineered life in space?

Scientific Organizing Committee:

This workshop is by invitation only, for further information, please contact:
Stephanie Langhoff, Chief Scientist, NASA Ames Research Center
Stephanie.R.Langhoff@nasa.gov, 650-604-6213