Not long ago SpaceX boss Elon Musk appeared smoking cannabis on Joe Rogan's podcast "The Joe Rogan Experience". Now the entrepreneurial visionary will go a little further: his rocket company will carry cannabis to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of an experiment to study the mutation of plant species under conditions of microgravity.
While SpaceX (the aerospace transport company founded in 2002 by Elon Musk) will be the messenger, Front Range Biosciences, an agricultural biotechnology company, has just announced that it will be sending cell cultures of the hemp plant to the International Space Station on a resupply trip in March of 2020.
The purpose of the project, developed in collaboration with SpaceCells USA Inc. and BioServe Space Technologies at the University of Colorado, is to see whether or not these plant cells develop genetic mutations. The company will send coffee plants too.
In total more than 480 cell cultures will be sent to the International Space Station, where they will be subject to environmental factors like exposure to solar radiation and zero gravity. The aim is to determine how plants will evolve under these specific conditions, and to see how the hemp plant develops in space.
This information is very useful towards the project's ultimate objective: determining how to genetically design plants capable of growing in regions affected by climate change. Last year, for example, Front Range partnered with a coffee company to create crops of this plant that can adapt to Southern California, after farmers in countries like Colombia have been greatly affected by rising temperatures and the reduction of sunlight in the region.
Knowing exactly how DNA changes depending on the environment surrounding hemp, which is highly adaptive, could be the first step towards the genetic engineering of other plants capable of thriving in regions that may have undergone similar changes. "There is a great opportunity to put new chemotypes on the market, as well as plants that can better adapt to conditions of drought, or cold," said SpaceCells CEO Peter McCullagh in a press release. "We hope to show, through these and other missions, that we can adapt the food supply to climate change."
This is especially important when we take into account that some experts have already cited hemp as an essential resource to combat climate change, since the plant boasts rapid growth, multiple profitable uses, and, above all, is biodegradable. The team hopes to carry out future experiments in which astronauts can cultivate hemp plants at different points in their growth cycles.