Kate Green is a laser physicist and an author, but growing up, Kate was a LEGO kid.

I had a lot of space LEGO sets and hand-me-downs from my older

brothers and I just loved living in that world. From the farthest reaches of

imagination comes a LEGO space set with all kinds of pieces to build all kinds of

spacecraft like this.

Now a writer of poetry and non-fiction, Kate's love of play and exploration created in her this huge aspiration to be an

astronaut to go to space. So why didn't she become an astronaut?

Oh! So why didn't she become an astronaut? Oh, probably just one or two reasons.

It kind of goes without saying, but becoming an astronaut is not only very hard, but pretty unlikely.

For Kate, going to space just wasn't in the stars.

But there was another way to scratch that extraterrestrial itch.

In 2011, Kate read an article about what astronauts eat in space, but the piece wasn't just

about their diets, there was a call to action.

The scientists were interviewed for this article. We're looking for participants to study this question of

space food and how to make sure that astronauts on a Mars mission might eat enough

food so that they can stay healthy.

And I couldn't believe it, you know, as I was reading this article I got more and more excited

because I just thought this is such a

strange topic of space research that I had no idea existed and then at the end

there is a link to apply to be a possible participant in this NASA study and I thought okay.

It was meant to simulate living in space, specifically living on Mars or the Moon, these

inhospitable lands that will devastate humans if they aren't prepared.

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