Space exploration from a Biomedical Engineer.

​Space has always seemed very exciting to me, curiously, it was never among my options as a career path until a few years ago.
Something that tends to attract attention is that if I am interested in the aerospace field why am I studying biomedical engineering, hold on, I will explain. Since I can remember I wanted to study medicine and it was until 2017, after being part of FIRST for 3 years on the LamBot 3478 team, that I realized that I also liked engineering. There was something about being able to build something from scratch and then watching it work that just took my breath away.

It was not until the last high school year that I decided that biomedical engineering was the perfect combination of engineering and medicine, and that space was only going to be a hobby. 

​​Already in college, none of the possible career specializations intrigued me, don't get me wrong, each one is important and incredibly interesting, but I could not find one that excited me the way space did. It was at this time that I contemplated the possibility that maybe, in future space missions, biomedical engineers would be needed, people capable of understanding how different gravity could affect the human body, how fluids react to microgravity, what needs a person to survive on the Moon or Mars, and also the adaptation that medical equipment would require depending on gravity.

Susana Paola Tristán Pérez​

Biomedical engineering student at Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí.
She was the winner of a scholarship to participate in the IASP STEMxgirls in 2019 and winner of the first place in the program.
She is currently one of the 20 people from Latin America selected for the International Summer Space School in Samara, Russia.

​In 2019 I found the IASP STEM x Girls Program on AEXA's website, this new all-girls initiative consisted of an Aerospace Project contest, in which the winners would attend this program at the Kennedy Space Center to live like an astronaut for a week. So if you won you got a 100% scholarship for this experience. Honestly, I thought that such scholarships were only won by people of impressive intellect that have already had an amazing career path on the field and that it was practically impossible for me to get it, but I had nothing to lose. 

To get the scholarship you had to complete a challenge: designing a mission to Mars and writing an essay, also about Mars in just 3 days, you had a limited budget, and it had to be feasible. I wrote my essay on how humans were not medically prepared to live on Mars,  I was so sure I was not going to win that even after seriously putting my soul in it, I called my space mission “Martehuala”, cool name, but not very Scholarship worth it. 
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I was very surprised when the AEXA email arrived informing me that I had been selected for the scholarship.

​The first day of the program finally arrived, I remember being nervous because I had no idea what the rest of the women participating were like, and I had no idea how the teams would be formed, long story short, I did not know anything, just that we were going to have a challenge and a week to come up with a solution.

The challenge was to propose a material that could be used to create habitats on the Moon, mainly intended for Artemis missions. Solving it was hard but, sincerely, this program was one of the best experiences of my life, I had the opportunity to fly an airplane, understand the physics behind skydiving and practice it indoors, train as an astronaut, make amazing friends, etcetera.

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​All of the participants were incredibly talented and intelligent, my team and I gave our best in developing our idea and, fortunately, we were selected as the winning team with our project called "MoonFone" and we are currently waiting for August to launch the sample of our winning material idea to the MISSE module onboard the ISS. This experience not only gave me this great opportunity but also showed me that space is a multidisciplinary field, you do not have to be an aerospace engineer or a physicist to get involved, you just have to like space and know how to work hard.
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The IASP STEM x Girls opened my eyes to a world of possibilities, it was a life-changing experience. Thanks to this program, I had the opportunity to talk about the importance of medicine in the space field and to promote STEM, decided to focus my career on space field and currently, I have been selected for the Summer Space School 2020 in Samara, Russia, and the truth is that I would not have had the courage to apply for that school if I had not participated in this program, it all started here, writing a mission to Mars called “Martehuala”.

In conclusion, do not stop yourself from trying new things.