(NASA/YouTube) Earlier in the day, NASA spotlighted one of the engineers that supports NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, or CCP, which is the name of the program that underlies NASA and SpaceX’s joint partnership on these astronaut flights. Crystal Jones is the deputy manager of NASA’s CCP ground and mission operations, which is charged with “assessing ground systems for crew safety for both lunch ops and recovery,” among other tasks, Jones said. She shared her backstory: “I did always know that I wanted to work as NASA, ” Jones said, “ever since I was a very young girl.” But since she was a preteen, she said, her parents’ drug and alcohol abuse impacted her life in a “severe way.” “We ended up homeless had to stay in an abandoned bus and eventually transitioned to a homeless shelter,” she said. “After that time, we never seemed to be able to recover as a family.” But Jones said she used school computers to learn how to apply for colleges and financial aid. She ultimately got a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics from the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida — which is just a 40-mile drive from NASA’s launch facilities. Ultimately, she earned a bachelor’s in astrophysics and a masters in space systems. Later in life, her parents overcame their addictions, though her mother passed away earlier this year. “This necklace that I’m wearing is made with her ashes,” Jones said on NASA’s livestream. “And I wear it for every launch in her memory.” Link Copied! Crews will conduct various research projects at the ISS — including printing human organs in space SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is seen on the launch pad at Launch Complex 39A on October 4 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Joel Kowsky/NASA) Once members of the Crew-5 mission arrive on the International Space Station, the science begins. The astronauts will set to work conducting spacewalks, during which astronauts exit the ISS, to maintain the space station’s exterior, as well as performing more than 200 science experiments. One line of study revolves around getting closer to the long-term plan of printing human organs in space. BioFabrication Facility (BFF) arrived at the space station in 2019, according to NASA, but later had to go back to earth for maintenance and upgrades in 2020. Now, this fall, the BFF will be back in space. Crews will use it to continue to test the “in-orbit manufacture of cardiac and orthopedic tissue” among other things, NASA said. Other studies will involve research that will help inform future space missions — like theLiquid Behavior investigation. NASA said the goal is to better predict how liquids move around in zero gravity so that scientists can improve the designs of lunar rovers. Scientists say heart stem cells could provide a way to treat heart disease and, according to NASA, microgravity might be the key to producing more of these cells, improving their viability and accelerating the rate at which these heart stem cells mature. “The Project EAGLE investigation will study how spaceflight affects properties of heart muscle cells derived from stem cells in an aim to establish a functional heart tissue model that mimics heart disease and can be used to test new drugs,” NASA said. Meet the crew: NASA’s astronaut Nicole Aunapu Mann will serve as mission commander and also become the first Native American woman to travel to Earth’s orbit. She’ll fly alongside fellow NASA astronaut Josh Cassada, who is from Minnesota; Koichi Wakata of Japan’s space agency, called JAXA, or Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency; and Anna Kikina, a Roscomos cosmonaut who joined this mission as part of a US-Russian ride-sharing agreement. Link Copied!