Climate crisis, nuclear apocalypse, meteor impact… Humanity might need a Planet B. But it must first know how to reproduce in space, warns a Dutch entrepreneur.
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Egbert Edelbroek leads the pioneering company Spaceborn United, which deals with reproduction and possible births in the partial gravity environment on Mars.
The challenges are galactic. The first sexual relationships in space seem utopian, but the ambitious Dutchman is convinced that he will give birth to a human being conceived in space within his lifetime.
“If you want to have human colonies (…) outside the Earth and they want to be truly independent, you also have to face the challenge of reproduction,” he believes.
Humanity must therefore “become a multiplanetary species,” he emphasizes to AFP.
Given the enormous challenges of possible sexual relationships in space, the biggest of which is the lack of gravity that would separate couples, Spaceborn United primarily aims to create an embryo in space.
The company is working on breeding mice first for ethical reasons before considering shipping human sperm and eggs far from Earth. With this in mind, she created a disk 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.
Ethical question
The embryo is then cryogenically frozen to halt its development and ensure safe return under difficult conditions, including shock and gravity.
A launch with mouse cells is planned for the end of next year, and it will be at least “five or six years” before the first launch to produce a human embryo, Mr Edelbroek said.
But it is only a small step, and ethically it will be a giant leap before such an embryo can be implanted back into a woman and a first child conceived in space is born.
“It is a sensitive topic. Ultimately you are exposing 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 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 aiming to develop a human embryo in space, hopes humanity will achieve natural birth in space, although he admits the road is “long”.
Bodily fluids pulled downward on Earth would be pulled upward in a low-gravity environment, presenting several challenges.
While adult bodies can handle some differences, a growing fetus is more “vulnerable.” “So you first have to create the perfect environment,” he explains.
“Insanely ambitious”
The current development of space tourism should also be taken into account: travelers of a new type may want to be the first to design in space, the entrepreneur foresees, raising awareness of the risks in the industry.
Spaceborn’s research – which replicates the process of in vitro fertilization in space – also helps people on Earth get pregnant, according to Edelbroek.
He originally hoped that a baby could be conceived in space within a few years, but the scale of the challenges forced him to scale back his ambitions.
“We went from extremely ambitious to just very ambitious,” he explained.
But the 48-year-old remains convinced that a baby will be born in space during his lifetime: “I expect to live to be at least 100 years old. So that should give us enough decades to get there.”