The next 10 years are poised to be the most transformative decade yet in the space industry. A 2024 World Economic Forum report forecasts that the space-related economy will grow 9% per year, reaching $1.8 trillion by 2035. UC San Diego researchers are integral to this explosive growth, both through their work in existing industries and innovations that are creating new ones altogether. This article is the first in a series exploring the work of UC San Diego researchers, staff and alumni in and around space and how it will revolutionize the future for generations to come.
Space is the next frontier.
And it isn’t just related to travel: Research made possible in space — in the low-Earth orbit of the International Space Station, via satellites that constantly orbit the globe and from information gathered by powerful telescopes — protects and saves lives on Earth in ways that simply would not otherwise be possible. Faculty at the University of California San Diego’s School of Medicine, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Jacobs School of Engineering are leading the way in these breakthroughs.
UC San Diego researchers are already leading efforts that benefit human life across the globe. These include life science research that improves the care and treatment of those with devastating diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's. Earth science data collection that will bolster national defense, pinpoint the effects of climate change and protect people from its disastrous effects, including the increasing frequency and intensity of storms. And even mathematical calculations about the probability of meteorites catastrophically hitting Earth.
“The race to advance research in space is of incredible importance to our country,” says Corinne Peek-Asa, the vice chancellor for research and innovation at UC San Diego. “UC San Diego has a crucial role as a thought and discovery leader in how the U.S. manages this race, but it is not a race that we can run in isolation. This is going to be a global solution where scientists, industry and government work in partnership to better understand ourselves and the Earth.”
Aging In space time
In the last seven years, UC San Diego has become a pioneer at performing health research in space, seeking to develop treatments for diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. And much of that research is sent to space in shoebox-sized miniaturized labs that automatically run without input from astronauts.
According to the most recent data available from the World Cancer Fund, almost 20 million new cases of cancer are diagnosed annually. And according to the World Health Organization, cancer is a leading cause of death globally, with the most recent data showing that approximately 10 million people die annually from cancer-related deaths.
This is an enormous global problem that researchers are hard at work trying to solve.
Catriona Jamieson and Alysson Muotri, from the Sanford Stem Cell Institute at UC San Diego, have the distinction of having sent a combined 18 sets of stem cell- and regenerative medicine-related scientific experiments — many funded at least partially by NASA — to space since 2019. Their launch list includes NASA SpaceX CRS-33, which launched last summer and returned in February. With their inclusion in the mission, Jamieson and Muotri's research projects became the longest-running biologic experiments in space.
Why send these experiments to the International Space Station? Because the stress of being in space can age human cells at such an accelerated rate that mere days in space equal to years on Earth. This gives researchers a glimpse into the future, allowing them to see how stem cells, inflammation, cancer and neurodegenerative brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's, ALS and Parkinson’s, will evolve and develop in patients on Earth. These insights may give them a head start on developing the care and medication necessary to help patients before their degenerative diseases progress to an untreatable stage.
Catriona Jamieson
Jamieson is a medical doctor, professor of medicine, chief of the Division of Regenerative Medicine and director of SSCI. Her work is focused on finding more selective and less toxic cancer treatments and understanding the mechanisms of stem cell resilience that can extend life.
“UC San Diego’s Sanford Stem Cell Institute is in a unique position as the only fully integrated stem cell institute in the country,” Jamieson says. “We have an established track record of working as a team to engineer solutions for really tough medical problems.”
For her current research into stem cells, inflammation and cancer, “Space accelerates cancer biology, so we get rapid insights into how cancer evolves under conditions of stress,” she says. “Space is an extremely stressful environment for cells and allows us to see what happens when cancer evolves or metastasizes in days instead of years.”
Cells that experience the stressors introduced by space “also show us mechanisms of resilience,” Jamieson says. The changes that stem cells undergo in space can then be used to develop treatments or medicine for more effective treatments, she explains.
Alysson Muotri
At UC San Diego, Muotri is a professor in the departments of pediatrics and cellular and molecular medicine and the director of the Sanford Integrated Space Stem Cell Orbital Research Center at SSCI. He studies aging, neurological diseases and the human brain.
“Space research is crucial, and I would even argue essential, for scientists studying aging, rejuvenation, resilience and age-related neurological conditions because there is no human model of brain aging on Earth,” Muotri explains.
Muotri’s findings could help clear a path to treatments for millions suffering from common disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as those who suffer from rare diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly referred to as ALS.
His research has already revealed a potential treatment for Rett syndrome — a devastating neurodevelopmental condition with no cure — that is currently in a clinical trial approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Space can be used to test compounds that protect the brain from degeneration, and Muotri is looking at the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest for novel compounds from plants generally unknown to Western medicine.
Jamieson and Muotri both have high hopes for the future that research in space could make possible. But these hopes are tempered by the existing realities of space travel. Remember those shoebox-sized, automated laboratories?
Currently, sending experiments to space is a complicated process that differs sharply from carrying out experiments on the ground. “The number of experiments is limited by the size and current automation within these sealed laboratories-in-a-box,” Muotri says. “On Earth, you execute and if something goes wrong you can just repeat it the next day. In space, you need a plan A, B, C and D.”
With the increasing complexity of health-related research, Muotri says that a change in process is needed for research conducted in space. That miniaturized shoebox lab experiment won’t be enough for the big questions that need to be answered. “We need human-trained eyes and hands,” he says. “We need to scale up what we are currently doing.”
Scientists at SSCI are already planning how to meet that need. “Our solution is to train our scientists to become astronauts — the other way around is not feasible due to the training time — to work in a lab in orbit,” Muotri says. “This requires creativity, novel ways of funding science and long-term commitment. We are building a large consortium that includes international governments, shamans from tribes in the rainforest who have ancestral medicinal knowledge, pharmaceutical companies, patient-serving foundations and private companies that are aligned with our vision.”
Taking measurements from space
UC San Diego is also home to the renowned Scripps Institution of Oceanography: one of the oldest, largest and most important locations for the study of ocean, earth and atmospheric research in the world.
Scripps is well-known for its crucial research into climate change and its effects. Rising sea levels. The increasing frequency and intensities of storms. Even tsunamis. Better predicting such catastrophic events so that defenses — such as the Thames Tidal Barrier that prevents flooding in 78 square miles of central London in the United Kingdom — can be built will save countless lives.
At Scripps, some breakthroughs are happening thanks to space technology many of us spend very little time thinking about: satellites.
Helen Amanda Fricker
Helen Amanda Fricker, a professor of geophysics at Scripps, was recently awarded a dedicated satellite mission through the NASA Earth System Explorers Program. Once completed and launched, her satellite — known as the Earth Dynamics Geodetic Explorer, or EDGE, satellite — will carry cutting-edge imaging lidar that will send out and record pulses of light to measure the surface features of land-based ecosystems, such as forests, as well as glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice in the polar regions.
Earth’s land-based ecosystems and polar regions are closely interconnected. “Earth’s forests store carbon and provide habitat, while its polar regions play a vital role in regulating global climate, making life on Earth possible,” Fricker says. Her work focuses on ice sheet evolution and the characteristics of the water located underneath glaciers and their impacts on global climate.
“We are seeing significant changes in these regions, including ice sheet melt, sea ice loss and glacier retreat. These visible changes in the cryosphere — the parts of Earth covered by ice and snow — have far-reaching implications, from rising sea levels and increasing flooding and storm surge heights at coastlines around the globe to impacts on water resources and biodiversity,” she says. “We need to monitor Earth’s vital signs as these changes affect us all.”
The data gathered by EDGE represent a high return investment and will strengthen environmental awareness and national security by improving the management of coastlines and forests, “allowing us to prepare for events such as wildland fire, sea-level rise, shipping accessibility and extreme weather events,” Fricker explains. For example, understanding where — and how much — ice is being lost in polar regions is crucial for accurate predictions about future coastal sea-level rise.
Satellite missions are the only practical way to monitor ice sheets and collect the necessary high-resolution data to make coastal sea level predictions. “EDGE will help us efficiently manage our national resources and safeguard our citizens,” Fricker says. The projects made possible by its data “are vital for long-term planning and risk management,” she adds. “They inform everything from flood defense strategies to land-use policies, making polar ice loss not a distant concern, but a pressing issue for public safety and global resilience.”
David Sandwell
Also a professor of geophysics at Scripps, David Sandwell is using Surface Water and Ocean Topography, or SWOT, a satellite-based radar altimeter system that utilizes radio waves to collect precise altitude measurements. The quick-moving satellite travels on a path that covers the entire globe every 21 days, collecting data on surface water measurements so that researchers can extrapolate information about seafloor topography. This crucial information can be used for national security purposes; to better understand tides and currents; and to model potential tsunami formation, spread and areas of impact.
“We can now understand how seafloor spreading worked in the past — how the plates and ocean basins have opened — where the propagating ridges are, and where all the seamounts are,” says Sandwell.
This information is crucial for national security because every geologic formation under the water is not only an obstacle that a submarine could potentially hit, it also has a gravity field that creates a “bump” of water that affects the angle of the water surface around it, according to Sandwell.
“In addition to the importance of navigation, if there was a nuclear war and you wanted to launch your intercontinental missile to accurately hit something, you have to know the gravity field at your launch site,” Sandwell says.
Data collected by SWOT also enables researchers to map “deep ocean trenches where tsunami are generated,” Sandwell says. “A tsunami is generated by a megathrust earthquake caused where one plate is going down underneath another and they slide suddenly,” he explains. “You need to know the shape of the seafloor to know how that tsunami is going to be generated and where it will propagate.”
And once engineers know what natural disasters can strike an area and the potential size of such disasters, they can better design coastal infrastructure and buildings to protect the people who live in those regions.
Asteroid early warning
Despite all the excitement Hollywood offers with blockbuster films about saving Earth from disasters like asteroids, the truth is that saving the planet in those scenarios involves math. A lot of math.
Fortunately, Jacobs School of Engineering researchers such as professors Thomas Bewley and Aaron Rosengren, and doctoral student Benjamin Hanson, are at the forefront of protecting us from this kind of potential disaster. The three mechanical and aerospace engineers are working on predictive models that assess the risk of a large meteorite making it through Earth’s atmosphere intact and hitting the ground.
Asteroids (larger than 3 feet in diameter) and meteoroids (smaller than 3 feet in diameter) are chunks of rock and metal that orbit the sun, just like planets. When either breach our atmosphere but are small enough to burn up in that process, they are called meteors — or shooting stars. But when a chunk of rock is large enough that part of it passes through the atmosphere, its surviving pieces are called meteorites.
It is the larger asteroids — and the meteorites they produce — that UC San Diego researchers are concerned with. Depending on the size of a meteorite, it could be a catastrophic event for life on Earth. NASA estimates that 48.5 tons of meteoric material — thankfully mostly as fine dust and small particles — falls on Earth every day.
Aaron Rosengren
“We use detailed computer simulations to help us understand which objects are harmless background traffic and which ones might one day require action,” Rosengren says. “Even when the chance of any single impact is tiny, the consequences of being wrong about a large object can be enormous.”
The raw information that Bewley, Rosengren, and others work with comes from a worldwide effort, including observatories as well as amateur astronomers who continually scan the night sky to find moving objects. That information is passed along to the Minor Planet Center, a global clearinghouse that links observations together and estimates preliminary orbits.
In 2024, an asteroid dubbed Asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered. Estimated to have a diameter of between 174 and 220 feet, it is roughly the size of a 15-story building, according to NASA. Or, in other words, it’s a giant space rock that would dwarf the iconic Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., if it were sitting next to it.
“Fortunately, based on our very accurate simulations, we now know with near certainty that YR4 is not going to hit the Earth in 2032,” Bewley says. However, if something of that size were to hit Earth, he says, “the impact would be roughly equivalent to 500 times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb — and depending on exactly where it hit, that could devastate an entire country.”
Meteorite hits on Earth have happened in the past, including at a still-visible 3,900-foot wide, 560-foot deep crater in the Arizona desert. This is why the work to predict the path of asteroid orbits is so important for protecting human lives.
The good news is that researchers are able to run probabilities of impact far in advance of a potential collision between an asteroid and the Earth. “For the class of objects we worry most about from a planetary-defense standpoint — hundreds of meters across — a realistic goal is to have at least 5 to 10 years of warning,” Rosengren notes.
“That sounds like a long time, but in engineering terms it is barely enough,” Rosengren adds.
And here’s where Hollywood comes in again. Much like a movie, counteracting the threat would involve spacecraft and missions to “nudge” the asteroid off its collision course with Earth. But that could happen only if there’s enough time to detect the threat and design, fund and launch a spacecraft and reach the asteroid, Rosengren explains.
If a dangerous object was discovered within only a couple of years, or — even worse — months or days ahead of a potential collision, “the response would need to shift from deflection to civil protection,” Rosengren says. “We would need to predict where the impact would occur, then warn and evacuate populations if possible, and protect critical infrastructure.”
This is why it’s important that scans of the night sky are conducted so rigorously, and all new findings are carefully plotted and assessed by Bewley, Rosengren, Hanson and others.
“What we at UC San Diego have done is pioneered the estimation of potentially catastrophic, highly unlikely events into the next 5 or 10 years,” Bewley says. “By doing so, we can anticipate which things we really need to be concerned about and potentially do something about in order to prevent a collision.”
Who says math is boring?
