SpaceX to deliver Cannabis to the ISS

SpaceX will embark on His business involves two of the most widely consumed plants in the world: coffee and cannabis.

The agrotech company Front Range Biosciences® (FRB) has partnered with SpaceCells USA Inc., which is funding and managing the project, to send coffee and hemp tissue cultures into space. The experiment will investigate whether plant cells undergo changes in gene expression or genetic mutations in space.

The cargo will be loaded onto a SpaceX CRS-20 cargo flight, scheduled to launch in March 2020. From there, the equipment will travel to the International Space Station (ISS), where the experiments will be conducted under strict conditions by NASA astronauts and designed by BioServe Space Technologies, a research arm of the University of Colorado.

Nearly 500 plant cultures will be present in the ISS plant incubator. BioServe will monitor the growing conditions for about a month from its operations center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Once the cells return to Earth, FRB will examine how exposure to space radiation and microgravity has affected the plants’ gene expression.

«This is one of the first times anyone has studied the effects of microgravity and spaceflight on hemp and coffee cell cultures,» said declared Dr. Jonathan Vaught, co-founder and CEO of Front Range Biosciences. «There is scientific data to support the theory that plants in space undergo mutations. This is an opportunity to see if these mutations persist once the plants are brought back to Earth and if there are new commercial applications.»

These changes are, in fact, the reason why it would be difficult today to smoking cannabis in space.

So why send coffee and cannabis into space?

The experiment could help farmers and scientists understand how space affects plant responses and whether plants respond well to being sent into space. The goal is, in particular, to address the challenges posed by climate change to growing conditions on Earth, such as drought and high temperatures.

«These are big ideas we’re pursuing, and there’s a huge opportunity to commercialize new chemotypes, as well as plants that can better adapt to drought and cold,» said Peter McCullagh, CEO of SpaceCells. «We hope to demonstrate through these and other missions that we can adapt the food supply to climate change.»

«We envision this as the first in a series of experiments we’ll conduct together,» said Louis Stodieck, chief scientist at BioServe Space Technologies at the University of Colorado Boulder. «In the future, we plan for the crew to harvest and preserve the plants at different stages of their growth cycle so that we can analyze which metabolic pathways are activated and which are deactivated. This is a fascinating area of study with considerable potential.»

Another startup, Space Tango, sent hemp seeds to the ISS via a SpaceX rocket, brought them back to Earth, and began growing them. Their results do not appear to have been published yet.