Our outer space citizens, right now

Steph P. Bianchini January 17, 2019 6 Comments

If you accept the idea that everyone/everything NOT living on planet Earth for all or most of their lives is a spacenoid (questionable as it might be, and the discussion would be long indeed…) we have a few of us that actually meet the requirement. Not humans, of course. Even the ISS astronauts hardly qualify, since as best only spend a few months in orbit, therefore a minimum timespan of their lives (if my data are correct the longest single stay in space belongs to Polyakov, with 437 days on the MIR).

But plants and fruit-flies do, and we have quite a long list of non-humans that have blossomed, lived, and died over there, as for instance:

• Zinnia flower & plants
• Lettuce, sunflowers & arucola (a type of salad); interestingly, since 2017, they’re also used in-situ for the astronauts to eat (in this case, to finish on their plate was a Chinese cabbage at its 5th generation. Not bad for the first example of circular economy in space).

• Fruit-flies, which, incidentally, were the first ‘animal’ to be sent out there (on 1947, on a German V2); since then, they’ve continued to be good customers of space flight (and happily so: a team of space geckos ended pretty badly in 2014, and nobody wants to see anything in kind again)

• Just last month, on December 2018, China raised the bar and shipped plants to the far side of the Moon with its mission Chang’e 4. “The Chang’e team loaded the lunar mission with various seeds including cotton, oilseed rape, potato, and Arabidopsis. The hope was the seeds could be grown on the moon and provide data about how plants behave in the low-gravity environment. After landing on the moon on January 3rd, scientists started monitoring the plant specimens for evidence they were germinating.” Exciting, isn’t it? Unfortunately, we won’t have anything ready for the forthcoming Moon village: as far as the first Moon crop goes, everything turned out dead.

Until next, spacenoids!