Timeline of Astrobotany
The timeline of astrobotany begins earlier than one might think. Since the first time humans dreamt of space, we've also dreamt of growing plants in space. The timeline below chronicles major milestones in astrobotany's history.
1880
Novelist Percy Greg writes Across the Zodiac: an early science fiction story about a space traveler who goes to Mars with plants. This is one of the earliest mentions of plants in space.
1895
Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky speculates about orbital greenhouses in space in “Grezy o Zemle i Nebe” (Dreams of Earth and Sky).
1945
Soviet astronomer Gavriil Adrianovich Tikhov coins the term astrobotany.
1946
Harvard biologists and U.S Naval scientists team up to launch the first seeds on repurposed V-2 rockets at White Sands, New Mexico.
1947
Soviet astronomer Gavriil Adrianovich Tikhov (mentioned above) founds the Department of Astrobotany at Alma-Ata Observatory.
1947-1948
Researchers at the University of Chicago-Illinois send lily, mustard, and radish seeds towards the edges of space with flights to between 65000-100,000 feet on a series of unmanned balloon experiments.
1954
Professor Jack Myers tests algae for bioregenerative life support systems for the USAF and NASA. This is the beginning of the space agency’s first serious interest in utilizing plants in life support.
1971
The Soviet Union performs the first biological life support flight experiments- building the first spaceflight plant habitats called “Oasis”. The Oasis series ran on several Salyut missions and was a major milestone for controlled agriculture in astrobotany.
1971
500 tree seeds are flown around the Moon on Apollo 14. These will be planted on Earth upon their return and are referred to as Moon Trees.
1973-1974
Students in Nebraska and California collaborate with NASA to observe rice growth in space as part of Skylab Student Experiment ED-61/62 Plant Growth/Plant Phototropism. This may also be the earliest example of citizen science in astrobotany.
1975
Onions grown in the Oasis 1M growth chamber on board Soviet Salyut 4 were consumed by cosmonauts in 1975, making them the first space-grown plants ever eaten.
1982
Soviet cosmonauts grow Arabidopsis thaliana onboard Soviet Salyut 7. These are the first plants to produce seeds and flower in space.
1994
NASA begins using BRIC (Biological Research in Canisters). Arabidopsis will be flown using this hardware.
1997
A joint collaboration between Russia, Bulgaria, and the United States leads to the first seed-to-seed plant growth experiment performed in space. In 1997, Wisconsin Fast Plants (Brassica rapa) were grown in the SVET-2 SG Plant Growth System on board spacecraft MIR.
2014
Data retrieved from BRIC19 aboard the ISS yields the first ever complete transcriptome RNA sequencing of Arabidopsis thaliana, allowing for monitoring of every single gene in Arabidopsis.
2019
Cotton sprouts in the Biological Experiment Payload (BEP) hardware inside China’s Chang’e, the first spacecraft to be landed on the dark side of the moon. This is the first astrobotany experiment performed on the lunar surface.