Pedro grew up between cultures, between countries, between the city and the mountains, equally connected to the dense urban fabric and the barren granite massifs he still returns to for personal balance. With ‘astronaut’ a clearly impossible child’s dream for a kid who was neither American nor Soviet, Pedro aspired instead to become an airline pilot, an adventurer, a travel show host, and a writer. More or less in that order.

Albeit sideways, he’d grow up to be all of those things. His career as a writer, journalist, editor, and publisher started in school papers and continued to adulthood; he wrote about cultural politics and Otherness, urban space, architecture, travel, cinema. He’d go on to study International Politics and Development Economics, pursuing a brief academic career, then transitioning to senior roles as a political and communications advisor with governments, NGOs, and international agencies such as the UN and the African Union’s Peace and Security Department. He survived his share of political chaos, riots, inefficiencies.

A restless and curious soul, Pedro has travelled to 70 countries, islands, and territories, lived in a dozen of them, and worked in nearly thirty. He lost count of the hundreds of flights, crowded train rides, rickety collective taxis, horseback hikes, and dizzying motorcycle rides over the years. He climbed an active volcano, got stuck in a Cold War military outpost, freighted a ski-doo across a frozen Arctic strait, and was forced to bribe corrupt border officers at least six times. He realized early on that he could write about all of it.

Aged 43 and a retired rugby player, Pedro is on track to earn his wings as a private pilot.

While he never got that gig as a travel show host, over the last decade he worked as a tv/film producer and director, specializing in socio-political storylines, in the voices less heard, the paths less travelled. In other words, he chronicles under-represented life.

A lifelong lover of speculative fiction and all-things-space, Pedro hopes to live to turn 91, just long enough to see humanity settle Mars. He is privileged to serve MDRS analog astronaut crew #238 as both its Executive Officer and Crew Documentarian. During/after the rotation, he will be imparting MDRS #238’s story on a multimedia platform, devising ways to integrate it in the collective narratives that bolster ongoing Mars research. He’ll be wearing flag patches for the Cape Verde Islands, the European Union, and Canada, his current home.