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Saffire is really a series of six
experiments all aimed at spacecraft fire

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safety fire safety has been a a big
concern ever since we started flying you

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know crewed vehicles into space a lot of
research has been done the trouble is

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there's always a crew around and you've
got to put it into a into a chamber and

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keep it confined and safe from the crew
well that's where Northrop Grumman the

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Cygnus vehicle comes in it's it's the
perfect vehicle for us to do what we

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really want to do and that's burn larger
samples because it docks to the station

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it ends up being filled with trash the
crew closes the hatch and when it does

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it's at 1 atmosphere and 21% oxygen and
then it goes away and nobody's on it

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when we ran Saffire 1 2 & 3 the sizes
of the samples instead of running

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something you know the size of a note
card was really something about the size

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of this about a meter long and about
four tenths of a meter meter wide what

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we really want to do for Saffire 4 5 &
6 is to take what we've learned here and

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really make a more sophisticated
experiment and then also some of our

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tests are going to be conducted at a low
pressure about 8.2 psi a and 34% oxygen

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and if you know things about combustion
you start increasing the oxygen level

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the fire should become more energetic
and those are the kinds of things that

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we're going to be doing on Saffire 4

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a bacteria phage is a virus but it's a

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virus that only targets bacteria not
ourselves not human cells so it's these

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bacteria that are the prey to this
predator this predator being the virus

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phage technology and looking at in
trying to develop phages can be a new

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and novel approach to targeting and
getting rid of pathogenic bacteria if

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you take a general antibiotic right now
most of the bacteria get targeted well

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what if you could develop a phage that
was highly specific to just the

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pathogen now you keep your gut
microbiome intact you don't harm

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everything else but you get rid of that
harmful bacteria now when you put it in

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space now we get a new environment
because in space the one commonality

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about space is at biology changes so in
this interaction we know that the target

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the host the bacteria which is e coli
grows faster will the phage become more

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lethal will it become more specific to
its its prey its host it's the target

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the bacteria or will the bacteria win
and become more resistant and be able to

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shed away and get away from that that
virus how does this happen in space we

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have no idea that's why we go to space
to do this project space provides a

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really unique environment to study the
phenomena like like bone and muscle loss

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because things happen so much faster and
that increases the our ability to assess

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drug therapies and and exercise programs
that can mitigate the loss of bone and

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muscle bone is a living tissue it's not
a static piece of rock that's in your

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body what we're looking at is that pre
osteoblasts those cells are on the verge

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of being a mature bone saw which can
produce a lot of the bone matrix that

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mineralize is it comes south bone the
question is how the spaceflight in

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microgravity specifically affect the the
changes in gene expression but the other

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thing we're going to be looking at is
metabolic pathways that's occurring on

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the space station and that actually
follows on with the genomic studies that

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we're doing so it gives you a more
complete picture of what's happening to

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the cells this flight is a second time
up for us we flew an experiment using

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these cells back in 2016 in this case
we're looking at a much tighter

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environment and we have a greater number of

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the cultures as well this is a scanning
electron micrograph that I took from

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some debris that was collected by our
crew members so currently the ISS has a

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blind spot in which we cannot perform
this analysis on orbit and it takes

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quite a while to get this debris back on
Earth and it's an even bigger problem

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when sample return is not an option such
as for deep exploration of space flight

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so for the past few years my small
company Vox has been working together

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with NASA to extend the capabilities on
ISS to be able to identify and study the

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structures a very small scale for small
scale we're talking about things that

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are on the order of one to ten microns
and maybe even smaller than that and

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this is a terrestrial instrument that we
developed initially and extended his

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capabilities with NASA the strengths of
electron microscopy are twofold the

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first is the ability to see very very
small structures and down to the nano

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scale and secondarily it has a
capability of identifying the chemical

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composition in particular the atoms and
the quantities of atoms inside that

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structure
looking ahead when we start going to the

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moon
building gateway and eventually to Mars

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this platform which is really a research
platform for future exploration will aid

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in a number of different ways