Space plant biologist Javier Medina on growing plants in space: GotG9

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! Emma’s guest on the show this week is Dr Javier Medina, a Space Plant Biologist with the Spanish National Research Council. He talks about why it’s essential we grow plants in space, what we’ve learned from his experiments, and when there might be a greenhouse on the Moon!

The results of the Roots experiment were published in 2007: Matía, Isabel, et al. “The “Root” experiment of the “Cervantes” Spanish Soyuz Mission: cell proliferation and nucleolar activity alterations in Arabidopsis roots germinated in real or simulated microgravity.” Microgravity Science and Technology 19.5-6 (2007): 128-132.

Gardeners of the Galaxy – episode 9 script

Hello and welcome to episode nine of Gardeners of the Galaxy, a podcast for all of the sentient beings in the Universe who have a passion for plants. I am Emma the Space Gardener, and I will be your host as we explore gardening on Earth… and beyond!

My guest on this week’s show is Dr Javier Medina, a Space Plant Biologist with the Spanish National Research Council. He works with the European Space Agency to send plant experiments into space and collaborated with NASA on the Seedling Growth experiments, which we heard about from Dr John Kiss in episode 5.

XXX Interview XXX

During the interview, when Javier and I are talking about Roots, we should have said that it was the first European space plant experiment on the International Space Station. It wasn’t the first ever European space plant experiment.

That’s it for this episode. I want to give a big Gardeners of the Galaxy shout out to Caroline, who very kindly supported the show this week. Thank you Caroline! Caroline used the virtual tip jar on my website,