The Czech Republic has taken a major step toward the nation´s first-ever mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Prime Minister Andrej Babiš announced yesterday that the European Space Agency (ESA) has signed an agreement with Vast to carry out the Czech orbital mission. The upcoming mission, involving astronaut Aleš Svoboda, will also include conducting 13 scientific and technological experiments. One of them is the PUMR-B project, a collaboration between CATRIN at Palacký University and the Brno-based company S.A.B. Aerospace.
Scientific experiment PUMR-B addresses the critical role that plants will play in sustaining human life in space. Its goal is to study in detail the physiological and molecular changes that spring barley undergoes while growing in a microgravity environment. A specialized bioreactor is being developed to grow this crop during the space mission.
“We believe that exposing barley to a microgravity environment will help us uncover previously unknown molecular and metabolic pathways involved in stress responses. This knowledge can then be applied in new breeding programs to develop varieties with greater resistance to extreme conditions. We are close to completing the bioreactor’s final design. As for the upcoming experiments, we are fine-tuning everything to ensure they are as effective as possible so that we can subsequently obtain as much data as possible from them,” explained Véronique Bergougnoux, the project’s principal investigator at CATRIN.
Members of the PUMR-B project research team had the opportunity to meet Aleš Svoboda in person at yesterday’s press conference in Prague. The Czech astronaut is expected to serve as the mission’s pilot, though his inclusion in the crew must still be approved by a panel of all five international ISS partners. Svoboda is set to join French ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who has been named commander of this mission.
“Meeting Aleš Svoboda was amazing. I’m so happy that I was able to present our experiment to him in person. I was excited as a little girl—a Czech astronaut is going to take our experiment into space, and the mission commander will be French,” expressed her double joy the scientist, originally from France.
The mission, which will be part of Vast’s first commercial astronaut mission to the ISS, is scheduled for 2027. Transportation will be provided by SpaceX using a Dragon spacecraft launched by a Falcon 9 rocket. Aleš Svoboda would thus become our second astronaut in history after the Czechoslovak Vladimír Remek, and also the first Czech to travel to the International Space Station (ISS).
The PUMR-B device is a self-contained experimental module designed for operation aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in the ICE Cubes Facility. Inside, it contains a special growth unit (SGPU) divided into two parts—one for plant growth and the other for their roots. The experiment itself will last 12 days.