Having dedicated much of his working life to studying the cannabis plant, Radišič believes it is uniquely qualified for space agriculture. It grows fast, adapts well, and has been an agricultural crop for thousands of years. According to Radišič, if at some point we want to grow life on Mars, this makes it an ideal candidate. “Sooner or later, we will have lunar bases, and cannabis, with its versatility, is the ideal plant to supply those projects,” he tells WIRED. “It can be a source of food, protein, building materials, textiles, hemp, plastic, and medicine. I don’t think many other plants give us all these things.”
Best known for producing the cannabinoids THC and CBD, Cannabis Sativa L. contains hundreds of different compounds, many of which are still being discovered and the effects of which we don’t fully understand. What we do know is that it is a resilient plant, coping well with stressors such as UV light and radiation (such as gamma rays), which are used to aid in its cultivation here on Earth. It has also grown in climates from the highlands of Tibet to the jungles of Southeast Asia and the deserts of Afghanistan and can be raised in controlled conditions.
Gary Yates, a plant researcher and head of cultivation at Hilltop Leaf, a medical cannabis manufacturing facility in the UK, agrees that the versatility of cannabis makes it a “leading contender” for a space crop. “Its hardiness makes it perfect for an extreme environment,” he tells WIRED. “It has shown great resilience and can grow in unexpected places. It doesn’t demand too much water, is known to thrive in low-nutrient soil, and has demonstrated phytoremediation potential, for removing toxins and heavy metals from the ground.”
Previous research has highlighted how conditions in space, such as microgravity and radiation, can influence plant genetics—and for Radišič, this is the key reason to send those cannabis seeds into orbit. “The point is to explore how, and if, cosmic conditions affect cannabis genetics, and we may only find this out after several generations,” he says.
According to D. Marshall Porterfield, professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University, who has been studying plant growth in space for several decades, the impact of radiation exposure on biological materials during space flight is “well understood” through previous studies. “It randomly causes mutations. Some of those mutations might turn up genes, they might turn down genes, they might knock out genes, they could disrupt whole signaling pathways,” he explains. “As a result, you get variable responses in the biological materials that could lead to new genetically stabilized mutations that could then be identified and derived.”
Radišič is not the first to query the effects of space travel on cannabis. A collaborative research team including a group that is based at the University of Colorado Boulder sent cannabis tissue cultures to the ISS in 2019. Nothing has been published, however, on how exposure to cosmic radiation and microgravity impacts the cannabis plant.