Jennifer García Carrizo: "It's logical to take Nutella on a space mission, we had it too"

A space crew must have diverse professional profiles. "In future long-duration missions, not only engineers and technicians will be needed, but also culture, humanities, and communication," remarks Jennifer García Carrizo, a science communicator at Rey Juan Carlos University. She herself is proof: 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 suns," 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 have you experienced 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 at someone's house to watch the launch. Now everyone has been able to watch it when and how they wanted, but this also has advantages because we have had much more information. That thing about the Nutella jar wouldn't have come out if there hadn't been a 24-hour broadcast. It has been exciting. On a technical and scientific level, it's beastly. 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 is the prior preparation.

How did you get to the Hypatia mission?

— I saw the news that they were looking for people and also a communications 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 opportunity. I really liked the selection process, it was very fun and I met the ones who ended up being my crewmates. For me, just 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 about. 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 wake up, exercise, and have four hours of work, which can be inside or outside the station. If they are inside, they are calmer. If they are outside, you have to put on your 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.

Talk to parents?

— And of course not. You have to send the reports to Earth. I had two hours to write a report disseminating what we had done that day and select a block of photographs agreed upon with the commander. All of this was part of the mission, along with questionnaires on health, human factors, sustainability, etc. Additionally, I had committed to sending a daily chronicle to Diario de León, because I am from León. I was very excited about the proposal, 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. 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 a specific technology to prevent it. What there is is satellite internet, just like in the Utah desert. There, when the mission had already ended, if we wanted to make a call you had to take the car and drive two hours.

What are the temperatures on Mars?

— The average temperature is from -60 to -65 ºC. In the Utah desert you have  a lot of temperature fluctuations, just like you would in Mars [where it goes from -80ºC at night to between 2 and 20 ºC during the day]. There in Utah there were times when you went out and it was -10 °C and then after two hours it was 20 ºC. You could get very hot, but you can't take off your suit.

Was it an astronaut suit like the one you would actually wear to 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 34 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 hard. Then I adapted. 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 these, 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 in science is cheap, but they are more economical than the real ones.

Did you get very hot?

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

You say that the hardest part is the preparation, but once you're 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. The mission didn't feel hard for me there, it was a pleasure. Because it allowed me to concentrate 24 hours on science. You didn't have to think about what you were doing to eat, you took 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 Nutella jar thing is 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 coffee be taken to Mars?

— Sure, 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 the one in snacks. Dehydrated apples, for example, you rehydrate them and it's like baked apple. The 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 flavor is the same.

¿Did you all eat together?

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

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

— You take 2000 liters and the goal is to use half. In the end, you have about 10.5 liters per person per day. And count the water you use to rehydrate food, wash, scrub... It's a challenge. You have a shower every three days, but very quick ones. An open shower in a normal house uses 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 would wet it and clean 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 on how to manage resources in space missions so that there are no waste products. Waste is a resource. I had a composter, not for food, because all the food there is already peeled and cut, but 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 it was used to water the plants.

And you also used menstruation.

— Yes, we had another project with Astrocup and the Hospital de Sant Pau in Barcelona to collect menstruation and see what we could do with it. Evidently, it wasn't entirely 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.

Was there any conclusion 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. In 2025, no one had yet formally studied how menstruation can be managed in space. It was a clamor for someone to do it.

Hypatia was an all-female mission, when actual missions are quite the opposite. How do you see the future of science in this regard?

— Step by step and with great confidence that everything will self-regulate, 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 exited 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 still a long way to go, but we are heading in the right direction.

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

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

What needs to change 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 give stability to scientists. When a person has a full personal life compatible with their work, they work much better and perform more. More than a gender issue, it is an issue of giving stability to scientists, because it seems that 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.