Scientists Are Sending Cannabis Seeds to Space

WIRED

8 hours ago

Jun 23, 2025 4:16 PM The versatile cannabis plant could, some scientists think, one day be useful for lunar and Martian colonists. For now, researchers will subject its seeds to radiation in orbit and see what happens. Photograph: Genoplant Research Institute
On Monday, June 23, shortly after 9 pm UTC, hundreds of seeds, fungi, algae, and human DNA samples, many of which have never been exposed to space before, will make their maiden voyage aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the mission is hoping to be the first to send plant tissues and seeds into a polar low Earth orbit and back, to allow scientists to study how biological systems are affected by the harsh levels of radiation found high above the Earth's poles. The information they glean, researchers hope, could one day help spacefarers grow crops on other planets.
The samples will travel in a small biological incubator called MayaSat-1, developed by the Genoplant Research Institute, a Slovenian aerospace company specializing in space-based biological research. At an altitude above 500 km, the incubator, housed inside a larger capsule, will cross zones near the North and South poles where concentrations of charged particles emitted by the sun are high due to the Earth's magnetic field. When it passes through these regions, it will be exposed to up to 100 times more radiation than objects orbiting at similar altitudes around the equator, like the International Space Station (ISS). The capsule will orbit Earth three times, in a mission lasting around three hours, before re-entering the atmosphere and splash-landing in the Pacific Ocean. If all goes to plan, the incubator will be collected from a location around nine hours off the coast of Hawaii and shipped back to Europe, where the real exploration will begin.
Among several research participants with samples aboard the mission is Božidar Radišič, who will be following the launch livestream closely from his office at the Research Nature Institute in Slovenia. The Martian Grow project, led by Radišič and his team, is sending approximately 150 cannabis seeds into space in MayaSat-1 to test their resilience and potentially accelerate their evolution. It's not a gimmick, though, or a quest for an otherworldly high.
The incubator, called MayaSat-1 and seen here in a protective case, was developed by the Genoplant Research Institute, a Slovenian aerospace company specializing in orbital biological research. Photograph: Genoplant Research Institute
Having dedicated much of his working life to studying the cannabis plant, Radišič believes it is uniquely qualified for space agriculture. It grows fast, adapts well, and has been an agricultural crop for thousands of years. According to Radišič, if at some point we want to grow life on Mars, this makes it an ideal candidate. 'Sooner or later, we will have lunar bases, and cannabis, with its versatility, is the ideal plant to supply those projects,' he tells WIRED. 'It can be a source of food, protein, building materials, textiles, hemp, plastic, and medicine. I don't think many other plants give us all these things.'
Best known for producing the cannabinoids THC and CBD, Cannabis Sativa L. contains hundreds of different compounds, many of which are still being discovered and the effects of which we don't fully understand. What we do know is that it is a resilient plant, coping well with stressors such as UV light and radiation (such as gamma rays), which are used to aid in its cultivation here on Earth. It has also grown in climates from the highlands of Tibet to the jungles of Southeast Asia and the deserts of Afghanistan, and can be raised in controlled conditions.
Gary Yates, a plant researcher and head of cultivation at Hilltop Leaf, a medical cannabis manufacturing facility in the UK, agrees that the versatility of cannabis makes it a 'leading contender' for a space crop. 'Its hardiness makes it perfect for an extreme environment,' he tells WIRED. 'It has shown great resilience and can grow in unexpected places. It doesn't demand too much water, is known to thrive in low-nutrient soil, and has demonstrated phytoremediation potential, for removing toxins and heavy metals from the ground.'
Previous research has highlighted how conditions in space, such as microgravity and radiation, can influence plant genetics—and for Radišič, this is the key reason to send those cannabis seeds into orbit. 'The point is to explore how, and if, cosmic conditions affect cannabis genetics, and we may only find this out after several generations,' he says.
According to D. Marshall Porterfield, professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University, who has been studying plant growth in space for several decades, the impact of radiation exposure on biological materials during space flight is 'well understood' through previous studies. 'It randomly causes mutations. Some of those mutations might turn up genes, they might turn down genes, they might knock out genes, they could disrupt whole signaling pathways,' he explains. 'As a result, you get variable responses in the biological materials that could lead to new genetically stabilized mutations that could then be identified and derived.'
Radišič is not the first to query the effects of space travel on cannabis. A collaborative research team including a group that is based at the University of Colorado Boulder sent cannabis tissue cultures to the ISS in 2019. However, nothing has yet been published on how exposure to cosmic radiation and microgravity impacts the cannabis plant.
He's also not the only researcher working to expose plants to higher radiation levels than previously studied. Porterfield, who is one of the scientists working on NASA's LEAF mission—a lunar plant-growth experiment that will go to the moon with Artemis III in 2027—says we know 'almost nothing' about the impact of radiation exposure beyond low Earth orbit. Understanding how variability in radiation impacts plants will be a 'critical focus' of the LEAF mission.
'We've been trapped in lower orbit for the last 30 years and haven't advanced a lot of the basic research that we need to go to deep space, where you find galactic cosmic radiation,' he says. 'There may be some unexpected responses from this variable source of radiation. Plant responses to these radiation issues are going to be important for future agricultural systems on the moon.'
Once MayaSat-1 has returned, for the next two years Radišič and his team will work with the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia to breed generations of clones from the space seeds to study genetic changes and plant adaptations, including 'alterations in cannabinoid profiles'—how much CBD, THC, and other compounds the plants go onto develop. The second phase of their study will then involve simulating Martian soil conditions and growing plants in controlled low-gravity environments on Earth.
Lumír Ondřej Hanuš, a chemist at Palacký University Olomouc in Czechia and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has been studying the cannabis plant since the 1970s. A research adviser on the project, he believes that there are 'many possibilities' for scientific investigation once the seeds have returned.
As well as potential genetic and epigenetic changes, the Martian Grow team will look for structural and physiological changes, such as differences in leaf size, chlorophyll content, root architecture, photosynthetic rates, and water use. They will examine what happens after the plant is exposed to stressors such as disease, and analyze the activity of enzyme hormones and secondary metabolites, which could lead to the identification of new compounds.
'Whether there are changes or not, both results will be important for the future, so we know how to grow cannabis in the space environment,' Radišič adds.
We're still some way off from actually growing cannabis on Mars, though, or any plant for that matter. Microgravity, extreme temperatures, lack of nutrients, and toxins in the soil do not make favorable conditions for cultivation.
'We will have to adapt to the environment on Mars, and slowly adapt our plants for them to survive,' says Petra Knaus, the CEO of Genoplant. 'For now, we believe it will only be possible [to grow plants] in a closed system container with the conditions adapted.' For future missions, Genoplant is developing a new space capsule in this vein, scheduled for its first reentry test in 2027, that will enable researchers to grow seeds in space and monitor them for several years.
While cannabis could potentially be a supercrop for the space age, back on Earth, it is still predominantly thought of as a recreational drug (albeit one widely used for medicinal purposes), which has prevented regulators and researchers from fully acknowledging its scientific potential. Hanuš is optimistic that the findings from the project, whatever they look like, could dispel some of this stigma and speed up its scientific acceptance.
'If interesting results are published, it could speed up our understanding of cannabis,' he says. 'It is a very important plant, which I think has a big future if humanity ever crosses into space and starts life on another planet.'