Here’s a question that doesn’t get asked enough: if we’re serious about living in space—on the Moon, Mars, or an orbital tin can held together with duct tape and determination—what happens when the bacteria come too?

It’s a fair concern. Human bodies are microbial ecosystems. We carry around something like 39 trillion bacterial cells, give or take a few billion depending on your breakfast. And all those microbes—your Staphylococcus aureus, your Escherichia coli, your everyday skin flora—aren’t left behind when you strap yourself into a Soyuz capsule and fire off the launchpad. They come with you. They adapt. They evolve. They get weird in zero gravity.

Enter Dr. Kate Rubins, the NASA astronaut and microbiologist who has actually sequenced DNA in space—because, of course, she has. And now she’s bringing her interplanetary perspective to SynBioBeta 2025, where she’ll be joining the “Space and Defense: Synthetic Biology Moonshots” session to talk about how synthetic biology might keep us alive, thriving, and slightly less microbially disastrous in extreme environments beyond Earth.

The Unseen World, in Orbit

Now, before we get too caught up in the "astronaut" bit (which, let’s be honest, is incredibly cool), let’s remember that Rubins is also a bona fide scientist. The kind who’s worked with poxviruses and did her PhD on viral entry mechanisms before deciding that space was the next logical step. She’s sequenced genomes in microgravity, worked on regenerative medicine off-Earth, and understands—down to the nucleotide—what happens to biology when gravity stops being a constant.

At SynBioBeta, Rubins will be helping us think through the challenges of biofunctionality in off-world settings. How do you create life-support systems that are truly regenerative—bioreactors that recycle waste, algae systems that produce oxygen and food, engineered microbes that can build materials or detoxify lunar dust? These are not hypotheticals. They are design specs for anyone who wants to stay on the Moon for longer than an Instagram post.

Synthetic Biology: Actually Useful in Space

This is where synthetic biology shines. You don’t want to send heavy industrial kits to Mars—you want lightweight organisms that can grow your materials in situ. You want bacteria that fix nitrogen, yeasts that synthesize nutrients, and viruses that deliver payloads (therapeutic, not explosive). In space, efficiency is not a luxury. It’s life or death.

The tools of synthetic biology—genetic circuits, programmable enzymes, modular cell systems—offer something rare: adaptability. Rubins and her NASA colleagues understand that when your environment is trying to kill you every second, your systems better be able to evolve. Literally.

And yes, we should ask questions about biocontainment, mutation rates in radiation-heavy environments, and how to keep your Mars base from turning into a glorified agar plate. Rubins is exactly the kind of speaker who will appreciate those questions—and probably already has a spreadsheet of the preliminary risk models.

Moonshots Need More Than Rockets

What makes Rubins’ presence at SynBioBeta especially compelling is that she straddles two often-disconnected worlds: the hard-nosed engineering of space systems and the squishy, stochastic messiness of living biology. That interface—between control and chaos—is where real innovation happens.

The Space Exploration track is aiming high. It’s not just about moonshot thinking in the metaphorical TED Talk sense. It’s about literal moonshots. About putting bugs in boxes and launching them into orbits where everything we thought we knew about biology starts to unravel—and reassemble—under new constraints.

So yes, synthetic biology might one day give us algae-packed oxygen loops on Mars. It might print food, recycle waste, and construct biosensors inside your spacesuit. But only if we listen to the people who have actually been there.

Kate Rubins has. And at SynBioBeta 2025, she’s going to tell us what we need to know—before the yeast mutates and the Mars crew starts glowing in the dark.