Santa Maria wants the science made in space to come back down

The surrounding ocean, the low density of air traffic and the island’s position beneath the routes flown by vehicles returning from orbit make Santa Maria one of the places in the Atlantic where a spacecraft can return from space with the greatest assurance of safety, and it is the companies now building those spacecraft who say so. For four days, the island hosted the Atlantic Space Hub: Designing the Future of Space 2026, which drew nearly a hundred participants from Australia, Turkey, the United States and a range of European countries.

Held in Vila do Porto from 22 to 25 July, the conference set out to join the two ends of a space mission: the research into how to sustain and improve life and health on Earth and in space, aboard space stations and aboard the vehicles that bring those experiments back, and to ask what is still missing to close that cycle from the Azores.

The island already communicates with satellites and receives their data. The Atlantic Spaceport Consortium is preparing a spaceport there, alongside other planned activities, which will add launch operations to Santa Maria. The European Space Agency (ESA), working with the Portuguese Space Agency, is building the infrastructure to receive the Space Rider orbital vehicle from 2028. ATMOS Space Cargo, which holds the first re-entry licence issued in Europe, intends to return a vehicle to the island in 2027. Orbital Paradigm and Space Forge share the same ambition, with the latter already operating an office on the island.

That effort addresses a need Europe has already identified. Opening the conference, Angelique Van Ombergen, ESA’s Chief Exploration Scientist, presented the European space exploration plan out to 2040, centred on three destinations, low Earth orbit, the Moon and Mars, with cargo return among the strategic capabilities Europe aims to secure. The Space Rider was one of the concrete examples, offering very high-quality microgravity and payload slots still to be filled. The afternoon session with commercial operators, including some of the world’s biggest names, moderated by Inês d’Ávila, programme manager for Space Transportation and Space Safety at the Portuguese Space Agency, drew the largest audience of the day and revealed how far the available solutions still are from the needs of researchers hoping to put experiments into orbit.

Over the following two days, the conference shifted scale, from the vehicle to the cell, focusing on what can be gained by taking biology into space. Organoids passed through the room, replicas of human tissue grown in the laboratory and exposed to radiation, alongside digital models that replicate each astronaut’s physiology and the search for life beyond Earth. In between came the microorganisms from the Azorean hot springs, studied by Duarte Toubarro of the University of the Azores as raw material for producing vitamins, recycling nutrients and sustaining life on long missions.

For Afshin Beheshti, co-chair of the conference’s scientific committee and director of the Center for Space Biomedicine at the University of Pittsburgh, the meeting brought into view “Santa Maria’s unique potential for space research, from engineering and mission operations to biomedicine”.

The final afternoon of working sessions brought the conversation back to practical matters. Funding was singled out as the main obstacle to making space research routine, with public and academic funding falling short of what it would take to generalise it. In Portugal, the Portuguese Space Agency created the PROSSE programme, which goes some way to addressing that difficulty. Set up under ESA’s PRODEX programme, the call funds research projects in space exploration. Between 2023 and 2025, it supported six projects, four of which were presented at the conference. More broadly, researchers and companies agreed on the need for a funding model that brings together agencies, commercial station operators and private firms.

Some of the equipment aboard the International Space Station is now up to thirty years old and falls well short of what a laboratory on the ground offers, while the shift to commercial stations will make crew time more expensive. Automation emerged in the discussion as a possible answer to that dilemma. “This is exactly the kind of thinking we set out to do with the Atlantic Space Hub. We bring together specialists from fields that have never sat down together to discuss these questions with the time to do it properly. It does not mean a solution is found, but it does get people talking to one another,” said Ricardo Conde, president of the Portuguese Space Agency, who chaired the opening session.

A meeting centred on space biomedicine spent most of its time on two questions not on the programme: how to standardise payload formats, as CubeSats did for small satellites, and how to get teams currently working in parallel to share their data. That point was underlined again by Hugo André Costa, executive director of the Portuguese Space Agency, who moderated the closing review session with Afshin Beheshti, director of the Centre for Space Biomedicine at the University of Pittsburgh, and Rodrigo Coutinho de Almeida, a scientist at the European Space Agency. “A discussion emerged over these days that was not on the programme. The people who build the hardware and the people who do the science need the same rules in order to work together, and those rules do not yet exist,” Hugo André Costa said. “With three private stations expected to launch in the coming years, we need to find a common basis so that science can be done in the same way on each of them, independently of the station. It matters that Portugal is there when those rules are written, and even that it helps to bring those discussions about.”

On Saturday, the conference opened to the Santa Maria community, filling the Atlântida Cine as Matthias Maurer, an astronaut with the European Space Agency, spoke about his spaceflight experience. Kate Rubins, a former NASA astronaut, returned to the science, outlining what spaceflight biology has already taught us about human health aboard the International Space Station.

The co-chair of the conference’s scientific committee summed the four days up in two sentences. “Colleagues from the United States, Europe, and beyond were impressed by the island’s infrastructure, expertise, and opportunities. This meeting marked an important step toward a new era for space research and innovation in Santa Maria.”

The Atlantic Space Hub: Designing the Future of Space 2026 was organised by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the Trivedi Institute for Space and Global Biomedicine, with a scientific committee led by Afshin Beheshti, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Space Biomedicine, and Rodrigo Coutinho de Almeida, a scientist at the European Space Agency. The event was hosted by the Portuguese Space Agency and sponsored by the Japanese company Otsuka Pharmaceutical.