Luisa Konga: Yoga as a Practice for Future Astronauts
Luisa Konga is a Mukongo-German engineer with a background in mechanical and space engineering. She is driven by a lifelong passion for human spaceflight and space exploration.
She currently works at POLARIS Spaceplanes, where she contributes to the development of reusable horizontal take-off spaceplanes and next-generation linear aerospike propulsion systems.
Alongside propulsion research, she explores the role of yoga in strengthening psychophysiological resilience for human spaceflight, integrating mind–body practices into preparation for both short and long duration missions.
When we imagine life beyond Earth, we often picture advanced habitats, closed-loop life support systems, and carefully engineered environments designed to keep the human body alive. But survival is not the same as living.
If humanity is to truly inhabit space, rather than merely pass through it, we must ask a quieter question: what sustains the human nervous system, attention, and sense of self when gravity, orientation, and familiar rhythms disappear?
This question sits at the core of my independent research on yoga in space. It is a research path I have only recently begun, and one that currently offers more questions than answers.
From Engineering to Embodiment
I approach this topic from two worlds that shape how I see space and the body: I am both an engineer and a yoga instructor. These two roles often appear distant from one another, yet in my daily practice they constantly overlap.
Engineering is about understanding how forces, materials, and systems transform energy from one form into another. Yoga, in its own language, is also a practice of transformation: breath becomes movement, tension becomes release, attention becomes presence. In both disciplines, subtle changes in input create meaningful changes in outcome. Whether designing a system or guiding a body through breath, the question is similar: how do we work with energy so that it flows in a way that supports stability, resilience, and function?
Astronauts operate in environments defined by isolation, confinement, sensory alteration, and extreme physical forces. Launch and re-entry subject the body to high G-loads. Long duration missions in microgravity profoundly alter proprioception, circulation, and orientation. While spacecraft are engineered to protect the body, the experience of these conditions is lived through the nervous system.
Yoga, in its original sense, is a spiritual practice. It is a technology of attention, developed over centuries to help humans regulate internal states under challenging conditions. In this context, the ancient discipline of yoga stands in striking dialogue with the modern ambitions of space travel. One emerges from traditions that look inward to understand existence, the other from technologies that reach outward into the cosmos. Yoga itself is built on the idea of uniting dualities, body and mind, effort and surrender, inner and outer worlds, in order to approach what many traditions call the divine.
This raises a simple but provocative question: could ancient somatic practices, rooted in spiritual traditions, support modern humans as we move beyond Earth?
An Experiment in the Air
As a first step in exploring this question, I conducted a small self-experiment during aerobatic flight training with PARSEC Space.
PARSEC Space flight training
In a roughly 40-minute flight aboard an Extra 200 aerobatic aircraft, I practiced Ujjayi pranayama, a controlled breathing technique involving a gentle constriction of the throat, while experiencing forces ranging from –1.5G to +5G. Throughout the flight, I logged physiological data using a Hexoskin biometric shirt.
Ujjayi breathing is traditionally associated with calming the nervous system, increasing oxygen efficiency, stabilizing heart rate, and sharpening focus. Practicing it under rapidly changing G-loads became a way to explore whether breath awareness could offer a sense of internal continuity while the external environment became unstable.
This was not a clinical study, nor did it aim to produce definitive results. Instead, it functioned as a probe: placing the body into an extreme context and observing how intentional breath interacts with stress, orientation, and force.
Why Include Yoga in the Training of Astronauts?
Space agencies already invest heavily in physical conditioning, cognitive training, and psychological support. Most countermeasures, however, focus on correcting the body after adaptation occurs, addressing bone loss, muscle atrophy, or vestibular disruption.
Yoga suggests a complementary perspective. Rather than only correcting symptoms, can we cultivate internal regulation before, during, and after exposure?
Breathwork requires no equipment, little space, and minimal energy. It travels with the body. In environments where mass, volume, and simplicity matter, this is not insignificant. More importantly, yoga addresses something often left unnamed in space architecture: the inner habitat. The mind does not remain on Earth when the body leaves it. Attention, anxiety, focus, and emotional regulation accompany every mission.
If humans plan to inhabit space stations, lunar and Martian environments, then sustaining mental presence may be as critical as sustaining oxygen.
What Culture Do We Bring With Us?
Living beyond Earth also raises a cultural question. Space exploration has historically been shaped by narrow narratives, often centered on Western, and Eurocentric perspectives of progress, mastery, and expansion. As humanity imagines longer-term presence beyond Earth, it becomes essential to ask what forms of knowledge, care, and practice we choose to carry with us.
Yoga represents one of many non-Western knowledge systems that approach the human body not as a machine to be optimized, but as a relational system embedded in breath, awareness, and environment. Bringing such practices into space is not about extraction or appropriation. It is about acknowledging that humanity is plural, and that our future beyond Earth should reflect that plurality.
Living beyond Earth is not only a technical challenge. It is a cultural one.
Living Beyond Earth
“Living beyond Earth” implies more than endurance. It suggests continuity of human experience under unfamiliar conditions.
My research does not yet claim that yoga works in space. At this stage, it simply proposes that it is worth asking how embodied practices might evolve alongside spacecraft, habitats, and missions. A next step would be to explore yoga postures and additional breathing techniques during parabolic flights, where brief periods of microgravity allow the body to experience weightlessness directly.
This work exists between science and speculation, between physiology and philosophy. Perhaps that is exactly where questions about life beyond Earth belong.
As we design futures beyond our planet, we may discover that some of the most valuable tools are not new, but already carried within the human body, shaped by diverse cultures, and waiting to be recontextualized rather than conquered.
Experiment in progress.
Luis Konga, 2026