Jennifer García Carrizo: "Sprouted beans with menstruation fertilize sooner"

A space crew must have diverse professional profiles. "In future long-term missions, not only engineers and technicians will be needed, but also culture, humanities, and communication," remarks Jennifer García Carrizo, a science communicator from the Rey Juan Carlos University. She herself is proof of this: in February 2025, she participated as a journalist in the Hypatia II mission, which – with an all-female crew – simulated the conditions of Mars in the Utah desert. It was "twelve sols," in practice fifteen days, of an intense mission that she now recounts in the book Mission Mars.

We have just left Artemis II behind, how did you experience this historic mission?

— I find that with social networks, we have lost what the generation of our parents and grandparents had with the Apollo missions: everyone gathered at someone's house to watch the launch. Now each person has been able to watch it when and how they wanted, but that also has advantages because we have had much more information. The Nutella jar incident wouldn't have come out if there hadn't been 24-hour broadcasting. It has been fascinating. On a technical and scientific level, it's incredible. And that everything goes well, because these missions are worked on long before. Whenever they ask me what is the most difficult thing about these missions, I say it's the prior preparation.

How did you get to the Hypatia mission?

— I saw the news that they were looking for people and also a communication person. Normally, when ESA opens a selection process, it looks for technical scientists, but here they were asking for someone with my profile and I saw the opening. I really enjoyed the selection process, it was very fun and I met the ones who ended up being my crewmates. For me, simply having been chosen to go through the selection process was already a gift.

What is a space mission to Mars like?

— Everything is thought out, planned to the millimeter, what I was telling you about the previous work. When you get there, you execute what you have been practicing for months and years thinking. I started planning the project in 2023 and we went there in February 2025.

And once there, what was the routine like at that Martian base in the middle of the Utah desert?

— You get up, you exercise and you have four hours of work, which can be inside or outside the station. If they are inside, they are quieter. If they are outside, you have to put on the suit and in the end they end up being five long hours. You return and eat. And then four more hours of work. If you went out in the morning, you will probably stay inside, and there are days when you don't go out at all. Going outside is very physically demanding, it is the most dangerous moment, and that is why it is only done when there is a scientific interest. And at the end of the day you have two hours of internet connection.

To speak with the parents?

— And absolutely not. You have to send the reports to Earth. I had to write a disclosure report in these two hours about what we had done that day and select a block of photographs agreed upon with the commander. All this was part of the mission, and questionnaires on health, human factors, sustainability, etc. Also, I had committed to sending a daily chronicle to Diario de León, because I am from León. The proposal made me very excited, but in the end, I ended up doing it in my room until 3 in the morning because the two hours of connection were not enough for me. I wrote at night and sent it the next day when I had a connection. It appeared in the newspaper a day or two late, but if we were on Mars, there would also be a delay.

On Mars there would also be a connection for just a little while each day.

— Yes, unless they develop specific technology to prevent it. What exists is satellite internet, just like in the Utah desert. There, when the mission was already over, if we wanted to make a call, you had to take the car and go two hours away.

What temperatures did you have?

— There is an average of -7 °C. But you have a lot of temperature fluctuation, just like you would on Mars [where it goes from -83 ºC at night to about 13 ºC during the day]. There were times when you went out and it was -10 °C and then two hours later it was 20 ºC. You could get very hot, but you can't take off your suit.

Would a spacesuit like the one you'd actually wear on Mars?

— No, it's a suit that weighs about thirteen or fifteen kilos because on Mars it would weigh that. On Earth it would weigh about 32 kilos, but on Mars there is less gravity and it would weigh about 13. It's difficult to work with a thirteen-kilo suit, it's a challenge. And for me, the first week was very difficult. Then I adapted to it. It's a blue jumpsuit that simulates a flight suit and a backpack with life support, like oxygen. It's not the real astronaut suit because there are very few of them, they are very expensive and are reserved for training people who will go to space. In simulations, more economical suits are used, I wouldn't say cheap, because nothing is cheap in science, but they are more economical than the real ones.

Did you get very hot?

— Apart from the suit, we wore clothes that repelled sweat and stains, which were from a Spanish brand called Sepiia. We looked for sustainable national collaborators. With that, you could wear fewer t-shirts and use them for more days.

You say that the hardest part is the preparation, but once you were there, what was the hardest part for you?

— For me it was breaking the simulation. I said: "Is this really over?". It felt very short for me. The mission wasn't hard for me there, it was a pleasure. Because it allowed me to concentrate 24 hours on science. You didn't even have to think about what you were having for lunch, you grabbed the dehydrated food, hydrated it, and ate. We took turns cooking and it was my turn once every three days. It was wonderful, you didn't have to go to the supermarket, you just had to do science. I loved being able to dedicate myself exclusively to science.

How did you cook? Did you have Nutella like Artemis II?

— This whole jar of Nutella is very surprising, but you can really take it on a mission because it's a cream that lasts more than 10 days, doesn't spoil, and doesn't need refrigeration. It's completely logical that they took it. We also had Nutella. It was one of the requests from one of the crew members. The other request was coffee.

Can you bring coffee to Mars?

— Of course, the coffee is already dehydrated. For dehydrated food, you simply add water. There were some things you could eat directly, like dehydrated banana, which is like what's in snacks. Dehydrated apples, for example, you rehydrate them and it's like roasted apple. Beef jerky looks like dog food, aesthetically, but if you rehydrate it, it tastes the same as beef. The textures and shapes are a bit different, but the taste is the same.

¿Did you all eat together?

— Yes. And this is super important, because you are locked in for two weeks with the same seven people all day, but you spend many hours alone working. There are days when you have to do group work but many others you don't. I deeply appreciated eating together, it was the meeting point to comment on the day. All crews do it this way.

Did you have the water there already for the whole mission?

— You take 200 liters and the goal is to use half of it. In the end, you have about 11 liters per person per day. And count the water you use to rehydrate food, wash, scrub... It's a challenge. You shower every three days, but very quickly. An open shower in a normal house is 20 liters of water per minute. And there I showered with 5 liters. You open the shower a little, put a bucket underneath, and reuse the water. It took me longer to organize myself not to waste water than to shower. The rest of the days I had a cotton towel, I wet it and cleaned myself.

They are learnings that serve the Earth.

— Yes, you learn that you don't need a twenty-minute shower to be clean. You can live with far fewer resources and be just as happy. I also had a research project assigned to me on how to manage resources on space missions so that there are no waste products. Waste products are resources. I had a composter, not for food, because there all the food is already peeled and cut, but rather there was a small greenhouse that generated leaf litter. In fifteen days, not much compost was generated, but my composter allowed me to extract a kind of liquid that you mixed with water and used to water the plants.

And you also used menstruation.

— Yes, we had another project with Astrocap and the Hospital de Sant Pau in Barcelona to collect menstruation and see what we could do with it. Obviously, it wasn't exactly research, because there isn't time in fifteen days, but rather it was a way to plant a seed and ask for this to be studied scientifically.

Were there any conclusions from your study?

— The beans we had germinated with menstruation fertilized earlier. But a longer and more formal study would be needed, with menstruations from different people, on many more beans, for a much longer time. By 2025, no one had yet formally studied how menstruation can be managed in space. It was a cry for someone to do it.

Hypatia was a mission entirely of women, when real missions are rather the opposite. How do you see the future of science in this regard?

— Step by step and with a lot of confidence that everything will regulate itself, because I do believe that some things are changing. One day I got very emotional. I was explaining to children of three or four years old in a school that only 11% of the people who have gone to space are women and only 7% of those who have left the spaceship are women. And the same children, boys and girls, told me: "But why?, I don't understand, if we are equal." Now the trend is breaking, there are more and more women scientists and in important positions. There is a long way to go, but we are going in the right direction.

Hypatia, an all-female mission, was met with skepticism or enthusiasm?

— It was very well received. We were the third all-female crew. But to be able to transfer it to real life, on a mission of months in space, we would need to achieve mixed and equitable crews, neither exclusively female nor male, and that they be diverse in terms of ethnicity.

What needs to be changed for it to be like this?

— The problem of reconciling personal life with research is not only faced by women, but also by men. What is needed is to provide stability for scientists. When a person has a full personal life that is compatible with their work, they work much better and perform better. It is more a question of gender than a question of providing stability for scientists, because it seems we only perform when we are pressured and given two-year contracts, and that is not the case. Science is rest, it needs calm to think. When this stability is achieved, there will be more representation of all genders and all ethnicities.