Elon Musk’s spacecraft manufacturing company collaborated with a Colorado research lab to send hemp and coffee plants up to the International Space Station in March.
The plant cultures will be shipped off to space in the highly anticipated SpaceX CRS-20 cargo flight set for launch in March 2020. The idea behind this move is to test the effects of microgravity and spaceflight on hemp and coffee cell cultures.
After a month in space, the coffee and marijuana will be taken back to earth. The Front Range will then examine them to know any change, which might have occurred due to microgravity and radiation in space.
Before they brought back to Earth, a team of astronauts and a crew on the ground will monitor what happens to them.
Dr. Jonathan Vaught, Co-Founder and CEO of Front Range Biosciences, said: “This is one of the first times anyone is researching the effects of microgravity and spaceflight on hemp and coffee cell cultures.
“There is science to support the theory that plants in space experience mutations. This is an opportunity to see whether those mutations hold up once brought back to earth and if there are new commercial applications.”
Front rage which is recognized for its coffee and hemp and the company wants to send over 480 plant cell cultures into space.
Reggie Gaudino, VP of research and development at Front Range, also said in a statement: “We are excited to learn more about both hemp and coffee gene expression in microgravity and how that will inform our breeding programs.”
Louis Stodieck, director of BioServe Space Technologies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, added: “In the future, we plan for the crew to harvest and preserve the plants at different points in their grow-cycle, so we can analyse which metabolic pathways are turned on and turned off.
“This is a fascinating area of study that has considerable potential.”
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