The 2025 AIAA Jeffries Aerospace Medicine and Life Sciences Research Award was presented at the International Conference on Environmental Systems, 13-17 July in Prague, Czechia, to Christophe Lasseur, European Space Agency (retired). He was honored “For leadership of international advanced life support research toward development of safe and reliable closed loop regenerative systems for sustained human presence in space.”
Lasseur was the head of MELiSSA (“Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative”), a project with the objective of developing a regenerative life support system allowing to reproduce the main functions of the terrestrial ecosystem (production of water, oxygen) in a reduced mass and volume with extreme safety. This project has significant applications in space exploration and on Earth itself, since it improves circularity and ecological processes. It also is described as the most successful circular economy project, since much of MELiSSA’s research is currently used on Earth as the method of industrialization of the PCR test, but also a revolutionary method for nitrogen (used in fertilizers), the management of excrement and other applications.
