Kai Staats

Kai Kruse Staats is an entrepreneur, scientist, and filmmaker. He is the director of research for SAM at Biosphere 2 and oversaw the habitat's design and construction. Staats and his colleagues developed and built SAM as a hermetically sealed and pressurized research station and habitat analog for experiments related to living and working on the Moon and Mars.

At the Arizona State University School of Earth & Space Exploration, he contributed to the design of off-world human habitats as project lead for an Interplanetary Initiative Pilot Project called SIMOC, a research-grade computer simulation and instructional interface to a Mars habitat that is hosted by National Geographic.

His last film series, funded in part by the NSF, chronicled the first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015 by LIGO, where he served as a visiting scientist.

Staats's work includes that done on iConji and Yellow Dog Linux.