China has been putting its batteries into the new space race. Apart from test your rockets back and forth as a key element to reduce the cost of missions and to fill the low orbit of satellites of all types (both military as data centers), are taking advantage of the Tiangong.
In one of the last shipments sent to its space station via Tianzhou-10, there was a very special package: a cell with embryos of zebrafish, mice and artificial humans. The idea is to experiment with them to try answer the question of whether it is possible to have babies in spacealthough it is by no means the first time that China has experimented with something like this.
The problem is that the results of some previous tests have begun to arrive and the outlook does not seem very positive for spatial reproduction.
China has been exploring this line of research for a long time. At the beginning of the year we already said that the Asian giant had sent a mouse to have babies on the space station with the aim of analyzing whether radiation and microgravity caused any problems or alterations in the babies. Of the nine that were born, six survived, so the study was considered a success and the decision was made to continue researching, but now with artificial humans.
Having babies in space is complicated
Don’t think about science fiction yet, those artificial humans are something much easier to understand. As they pointed According to Chinese authorities, these were not complete organisms that could become babies, but rather structures made from stem cells that mimic the very early phases of human development.
What was sent to Tiangong corresponded to embryos approximately 14 to 21 days after fertilization. Although early, this phase is crucial because it is where all the organs begin to form and where anomalies could be observed due to the aforementioned space radiation. These samples must be studied, but within the same line of research there are previous works whose results have just been published.
And the prospects are not very good despite leaving room for optimism.
As they point From the South China Morning Post, researchers from the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University in Beijing note that cells sent on the Tianzhou-6 mission and that were at an early stage did not grow and develop as well as they would have on Earth.
In the experiment, the success rate of generating germ cells dropped by about half, while sperm precursor cells multiplied more than 25% more slowly. Guilty? Microgravity and cosmic radiationexactly the main suspects if something went wrong in these tests. That is, it is not only that the cells already formed did not develop at the normal rate, but if you try to conceive in space, the sperm does not work either.
As we say, it is not the first time that China has investigated this and, in 2023, a set of automated cell cultures was already studied in the experiment module of the station. When they returned to Earth, they discovered that the success rate of growth of those special stem cells (primordial germ cells derived from pluripotent stem cells induced by humans) was reduced by half. That is, a success of 2% to 6% in the tests compared to the 6% to 15% measured in the terrestrial group.
The bottom line is that the more hostile environment in outer space made it much more difficult for primordial cells to become eggs or sperm. However, there is a glimmer of hope, as human-induced ovarian follicle count and activity did not show a notable decrease, so it appears that space radiation has a limited short-term impact on germ cells.
Researchers have already indicated that, despite the “slump” in the latest results, they will continue experimenting, since with potential long-duration missions in space, the prospect of pregnancies in space is something worth exploring further and it remains to be seen what happens with the Tianzhou-10 artificial humans.
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