Spent the day inside the Life Sciences Glovebox with @astro_jessica, who is patiently teaching the new guy. She’s running IVGEN Mini, our IV fluid generation experiment, and the idea is simple to say and hard to do: turn the station’s drinking water into sterile, medical-grade IV fluid. Why it matters: IV bags expire in about 16 months, and a Mars mission could run a few years. You also can’t launch the 100+ liters a sick crew member might need. So instead of packing saline, we pack a filter and salt. Station water gets purified to pharmaceutical grade, mixes with premeasured sodium chloride, and comes out the other side as normal saline. As a physician, this one hits close to home. If we can make IV fluid 250 miles up, we can make it in a field hospital, a disaster zone, or anywhere the supply chain doesn’t reach.