2023-11-14 10:12:50
Humanity must therefore “become a multiplanetary species”, he emphasizes to AFP.
Faced with the colossal challenges of possible sexual relations in space, the main one being the lack of gravity which would keep couples apart, Spaceborn United aims first and foremost to conceive an embryo in space.
The company works for ethical reasons first on the reproduction of mice, before considering sending human sperm and eggs far from Earth. With this in mind, she created a disc that mixes the cells together.
It’s like a “space station for your cells,” summarizes Aqeel Shamsul, CEO of the British company Frontier Space Technologies, which is collaborating with Spaceborn on the project.
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Ethical question
The embryo will then be cryogenically frozen to suspend its development and guarantee a safe return in difficult conditions, including shaking and gravitational forces.
A launch with mouse cells is planned for the end of next year, and it will be at least “five or six years” for the first launch to produce a human embryo, according to Mr. Edelbroek.
But it is only a small step, and it will take a giant leap ethically before such an embryo can be re-implanted in a woman, and a first child conceived in space is born.
“It’s a delicate subject. You ultimately expose vulnerable human cells, human embryos, to the dangers of space (…) for which embryos were never designed,” said Mr. Edelbroek.
The sensitivity of these issues is one reason why space reproduction research has generally been left to private companies rather than NASA, he says.
Mr. Edelbroek, who believes his company is the only one seeking to develop a human embryo in space, hopes that humanity will achieve a natural birth in space, although he admits that the road is “long “.
Bodily fluids, drawn downward on Earth, would be drawn upward in a low-gravity environment, posing several challenges.
While adult bodies can handle some differences, a growing fetus is “more vulnerable.” “So you have to create the perfect environment first,” he explains.
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“Crazily ambitious”
The current development of space tourism should also be taken into account: travelers of a new type might want to become the first to design in space, envisages the entrepreneur, who is raising awareness of the risks in the sector.
Spaceborn’s research – which replicates the process of in vitro fertilization in space – also helps people conceive on Earth, according to Edelbroek.
He initially hoped a baby might be conceived in space within a few years, but the scale of the challenges forced him to scale back his ambitions.
“We went from wildly ambitious to just very ambitious,” he explained.
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