Astronaut Insists the Mushrooms He's Growing in Space Are "Not the Ones You're Thinking"
A crypto billionaire and a filthy rich ketamine user have launched a trip to the stars — stop us if you've heard this one before.
We promise it's not quite as Silicon Valley as it sounds, though as Australian explorer and freshman astronaut Eric Phillips told Ars Technica, there are shrooms involved.
Alongside Norwegian filmmaker Jannicke Mikkelsen, German roboticist Rabea Rogge, and Chinese crypto billionaire Chun Wang, Philips is a member of SpaceX's Fram2 mission. The first private flight of its kind, the four-person team launched in a Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket for the first-ever civilian mission flying over Earth's poles.
Chartered by Chun — and, of course, greenlit by SpaceX owner and resident White House psychonaut Elon Musk — the four-person crew launched on March 31 and are currently in orbit, working on nearly two dozen scientific experiments they have planned for their short journey.
Among them, as Ars noted, is the plan to become the first mushroom growers in space — but "they're not the ones you're thinking," Philips told the website. Instead, per a Fram2 statement released ahead of the launch, they'll be growing delectable oyster mushrooms.
FOODiQ Global, the Australian company behind the "Mission MushVroom" experiment aboard Fram2, said in the press release that "oyster mushrooms are the perfect space crop" because they grow rapidly and have tons of nutrients. They even have "the unique ability to make vitamin D," the statement noted.
Along with all those nutritional benefits, those yummy shrooms will almost certainly taste better than space food — if top space minds can figure out a way to cook them in orbit, that is.
In an op-ed for Business Insider, FOODiQ founder and CEO Flávia Fayet-Moore said that she identified mushrooms as an ideal in-orbit crop, particularly for years-long missions to Mars and other planets.
"Can you imagine eating thermostabilized, dehydrated food for five years?" the space nutritionist — yes, that is apparently a real thing — wrote. "I can't."
We won't know how well the shrooms grew in microgravity until Fram2 gets back to Earth this week.
More on space life: Boeing's Starliner Disaster Was Even Worse Than We Thought, Astronaut Reveals
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