How It All Began

MELiSSA began, almost entirely, with the vision of one person: Claude Chipaux, a space engineer at the company MATRA (now part of Airbus), around 1987. He quickly brought in a small group of scientists and colleagues, Professor Marcel Lefort-Tran, Dr Guy Dubertret, Professor Max Mergeay, Professor Willy Verstraete and Daniel Kaplan, and together this group persuaded ESA (through Jean-François Redor, Chris Savage and Roger Binot) to fund a first, modest activity exploring the case for a closed-loop life support system.

The project’s first publication appeared in October 1988, and the first ESA contract was signed in March 1989. In parallel, a very basic experiment flew aboard the Chinese Long March rocket in August 1987, supported by CNES. MATRA recruited the first two MELiSSA PhD researchers, Jean-François Cornet and Christophe Lasseur, and, as far as the Foundation is aware, the very first MELiSSA trainee was Rémy Filali, at CNRS in Gif-sur-Yvette.