SpaceX from Elon Musk sends marijuana and coffee to the ISS

by druginc

SpaceX from Elon Musk sends marijuana and coffee to the ISS

SpaceX, the spacecraft manufacturing company of Elon Musk, is working with a research laboratory in Colorado to send 2020 hemp and coffee plants to the international space station in March.

Why do you wonder? Well, it's not just for fun - it's for a real science experiment, testing what happens to the plants in a zero-gravity environment.

Elon Musk made headlines earlier after it was revealed that astronomers have warned that Elon Musk's SpaceX and the Starlink project could leave our planet vulnerable to asteroid impacts.

These satellites would make searching for asteroid hunting much more difficult.

You may remember that Musk was also quite indulgent after smoking weed in public on a radio show.

Elon Musk previously smoked a blow during a live radio program
Elon Musk previously smoked a blow during a live radio program (source)

Now his company SpaceX seems to be working with a transport company in Colorado in Roder to transport cannabis and coffee plants to the ISS in March 2020.

Front Range Biosciences, an agricultural biotech company that breeds genetically consistent hemp and coffee varieties. They collaborated with the University of Colorado and a tech startup called Space Cells for the project.

More than 480 plant cell cultures will be launched in the space aboard the SpaceX CRS-20 cargo flight, scheduled for March 2020.

They are then transported to the space station, where they are stored for about 30 days in a special regulated temperature incubator.

A team of astronauts and a crew on the ground will check what happens to the plants before they are transported back to earth a month later.

When the cells return, Front Range Biosciences will examine the samples to see how microgravity and exposure to space radiation may have altered the gene expression of the plants.

Dr. Jonathan Vaught, co-founder and CEO of Front Range Biosciences, said:

“This is one of the first times that someone has researched the effects of microgravity and space travel on hemp and coffee cell cultures. There is science to support the theory that plants experience mutations in space. This is an opportunity to see whether those mutations will be sustained back on Earth and whether there are new commercial applications. ”

Reggie Gaudino, VP of Research and Development at Front Range, also said in a statement, "We are delighted to learn more about both hemp and coffee gene expression in microgravity and how that will inform our rebuilding process."

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 store the plants at various points in their growth cycle so that we can analyze which metabolic pathways are enabled and turned off.

"This is a fascinating field of study with significant potential."

Something different than Elon Musk who smokes weed during the Joe Rogan Experience, isn't it? Hopefully he won't have that much trouble with NASA this time ...

Sources including Dualdove (EN), Ladbible (EN), News18 (EN), TheSun (EN),

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