Rob Ferl

Photo Credit: ISS National Laboratory
- Date of Birth: Unknown
- Status: Occasional Spaceflight
- First Flight: 08/29/2024
- Last Flight: 08/29/2024
- In Space: No
Launches
Rob Ferl, a United States of America astronaut affiliated with the private agency Blue Origin, embarked on 1 space flights and engaging in 0 spacewalks during his/her career as an astronaut.
Rob is a distinguished professor and director of the Astraeus Space Institute at the University of Florida. He has spent his career studying how living organisms respond to extreme conditions, especially microgravity. He and his colleagues have worked with NASA astronauts to conduct numerous experiments on the International Space Station that have shown that plants turn certain genes on and off in response to changes in gravity. They were also the first to prove that plants could grow in lunar soil collected during the Apollo missions. Ferl is also a national leader in space policy, having recently chaired a National Academies of Sciences committee on the direction of space biology research over the next decade.