Humans are curious creatures. Even small humans are famous for their “why why why” stage, which my own child passed through as I interviewed space experts. My son had not yet realized that not everything is knowable and that of the knowable, not everything is useful or interesting. But we humans still can’t help asking questions, especially about nature and the fragility of existence.
Human life has one major vulnerability: our eggs reside on a rapidly warming planet. Dorothy Parker reportedly quipped after her legal hospital abortion that it served her right for putting all her eggs in one bastard. Space travel offers several solutions to the problem, though: it satisfies humanity’s curiosity about our surroundings and creates scientific knowledge that can benefit us here on Earth. Ultimately, the goal is to back up the processes of life on another planet, say, Mars.1
Living things, of course, need a continuous supply of food, including protein. Any space colony—everything sounds cooler when prefaced with “space,” no?—could do with a self-renewing source of protein like, say, a bird that lays edible eggs. As a bonus, since eggs double as proxies for the human body, studies of space eggs function as experiments in how microgravity might impact human reproduction.
The Soviets chose Japanese quails for early experiments. Japanese quails convert feed into eggs particularly efficiently. Only a third the size of chicken eggs, quail ova have greater nutritional density. Gram for gram they provide slightly more protein, fat, and calories; double the riboflavin and iron; and one-and-a-half times the vitamin B12. The Soviets blasted fertilized quail eggs into space in incubators several times. In 1979, the egg embryos aboard the Soyuz 32 developed more slowly than those on Earth. They were also missing a crucial body part—the head. The scientists thought that their equipment had malfunctioned. Later that year, sixty more quail eggs went up on the Bion 5/Kosmos 1129 mission. These eggs didn’t fare well on reentry to the atmosphere, as the humidifier malfunctioned. The embryos ended up dehydrated but seemed to have developed normally. In 1990 quail eggs aboard the space station Mir hatched, the first vertebrates to be born outside Earth’s atmosphere. Although it seemed like a success at first, in the absence of gravity, the chicks weren’t precocial, that is, they couldn’t run around and feed themselves. Instead, they slowly starved to death despite the astronauts’ best efforts to hand-feed them. Researchers eventually developed a harness to help the chicks get food, but there were still problems: the birds weren’t romantically inclined, a nonstarter as a space colony protein source.2
The United States has also sent eggs to space. In the beginning of space exploration, or at least close to it—before Soyuz, space walks, moon landings, or even rockets, in fact before we thought about whether we could have ongoing food sources—we had to answer the question, “Assuming we get up to the vacuum of space, will anything there kill us?” In the 1910s, Austrian American physicist Dr. Victor Hess risked life and limb in pursuit of this question. He grabbed an electroscope, jumped into a primitive high-altitude balloon, and floated into the strato-sphere to investigate. He inferred that little subatomic particles must be whizzing past, their effects a function of altitude. As his Nobel citation put it, “Surprisingly, he found that ionization first decreased, but then increased again at higher altitudes. He concluded that the upper atmosphere is ionized by radiation from space. He proved that this radiation is not solar through experiments performed at night and during eclipses.” Amazingly, he had discovered cosmic rays. As of 2021, it was still not completely clear where much of this space radiation originated.3
Fears about cosmic rays sparked many high-altitude balloon experiments, in which scientists sent up countless biological samples—plants, animals, tissue cultures, and of course, eggs—to see if the cosmic rays would harm them. When I began investigating eggs in space, my game design collaborator Jason, a space fan, suggested I join the Space Hipsters Facebook group. Alas, I am only a space poseur. I find space terribly big and boring since it is full of nonliving things like rocks and gravitational waves. But the space hipster group is where I met Dr. Jordan Bimm, a space historian and Guggenheim fellow who kindly guided me to many space egg details. He called the high-altitude balloon experiments of the 1950s “obscure military projects of dubious utility.” Basically, they showed that cosmic rays don’t cause instant death. And yet, as Bimm wrote, “Space is such a mirror for our culture, when you look at the ‘space version’ of a thing you really see a weird, amplified, version of it.” With that in mind, let’s take a quick survey of what went up in the balloons.
Although plenty of items—animals, plants and their seeds (eggs of a different kind), vegetables, viruses, and bacteria—went up, I’m most interested in two items: animal eggs and cultures from human tissue. The eggs included fertilized chicken eggs as well as ova from other animals. As Bimm wrote me, “Chicken eggs were among the first biological objects used to study the effects of the space environment. They were essentially a crude analog for a human body. Hen eggs did not make the transition to early biological rocket flights due to their fragility, but other types of eggs (sea urchin eggs, fruit fly eggs) were standards of these payloads too.” Eggs contain the most basic ingredients for life, so it made sense. If eggs can’t survive, what hope have the rest of us?4
The other proxy for human life was human tissue. A summary of more than fifty payloads sent up from the late 1940s to late 1950s by Swiss and US scientists includes numerous tissue samples from animals and humans. These payloads included HeLa cells—that is, an immortal cell line cultured from the cervical cancer of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who later died of the disease and who was not asked for her consent to their use. The payloads also included another piece of cargo close to my heart: “pieces of skin removed aseptically with a dermatone [sic; a dermatome is basically the surgical equivalent of paring knife or potato peeler] during plastic surgery following amputation of the breast.” Given the era, I suspect this nameless breast cancer patient was not asked for her consent either.5
Eventually, researchers determined that cosmic rays do not cause instant death in living subjects and began to figure out which humans to send into space. In the United States, they chose who you would expect, especially given, according to Bimm’s research, that ex-Nazi, former Luftwaffe scientists the government brought to the United States after World War II worked on the space program. These guys had—shocker—specific ideas about what types of bodies should be sent into space, choosing “the healthy, white, male, military test pilot with a degree in engineering,” per Bimm.
What I see hidden in the stories of the high-altitude balloons is a tale as old as time. To send men on an adventure, we chopped up the primal mother and sacrificed her—eggs, cervix, and breasts—first. Perhaps, technically speaking, the first human in space was not a white man at all but the cervical cells of Henrietta Lacks; her cell line didn’t only go up on the United States’ high-altitude balloon experiments but aboard the Soviet Union’s Sputnik-6 as well.
Chicken eggs first went to space in the stomachs of astronauts.
You too can be as constipated as a preflight astronaut if you nosh on a “low-residue” breakfast of steak, eggs, toast, and black coffee. According to the Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the nonprofit site MuckRock, the CIA developed this “top-secret anti-poop diet” for pilots undergoing ten-hour high-altitude spy missions; the first men in space had similar reasons to minimize defecation during flight. Eventually, the meal developed into a launch-day space tradition enjoyed by astronauts, ground crew, and space hipsters.6
Eggs are nutritionally dense—they are excellent sources of protein and fat as well as vitamins and minerals—but they are also reminders of home. It’s no surprise that they still appear on mission menus. In 2016, European Space Agency astronaut Tim Peake made a video of himself “cooking” breakfast aboard the International Space Station. He produces a packet straight from my personal egg nightmare, a wrinkly, shrink-wrapped yellow blob that he plugs into a panel of buttons, where he injects it with warm water. Then he massages it with his fingers. “In about five minutes, it will be ready to eat,” he tells the camera. Where is the romance? The hot pan? The butter? The verbal gymnastics with co-chefs? I’m sure he is happy to be eating anything at all in space where restaurants are scarce. But I wouldn’t call it living.7
The United States tackled the problem of incubating eggs in space in a uniquely American way, leveraging the power of capitalism. It started in the 1980s with a science teacher who asked a talented eighth-grade student, John Vellinger, to enter a NASA contest to propose an experiment for a space shuttle. Vellinger’s family raised chickens in their backyard, and he’d noticed that chickens rotate their eggs, presumably to counteract the effects of gravity, which pulls the yolk downward. He wondered how eggs might develop in a place without gravity and built an incubator prototype out of a wooden box. Although he won the regional science fair, his experiment did not win the national competition. Rather than giving up, he continued to refine the concept, and on his third try, it became a national competition winner. That meant he had a shot at putting his experiment on a real shuttle.
NASA tried to hook winners up with a corporate sponsor to develop their prototypes. For Vellinger, that meant a trip from his home in Indiana to Louisville, Kentucky, to meet with employees of a certain famous fast-food chicken restaurant. The Kentucky Fried Chicken executives agreed to the sponsorship, and suddenly Vellinger’s experiment started to become a reality. By this time, Vellinger was a freshman in college studying mechanical engineering. He called it “a dream come true for me.” Through Kentucky Fried Chicken’s involvement, Vellinger met Mark Deuser, who worked for the chain. As Deuser explained, the fast-food giant has a large research and development department filled with different types of ovens and lab equipment. They use it to develop technology for cooking in their restaurants around the world. Of all the groups at Kentucky Fried Chicken, his was the most logical to help John build the incubator.8
They started developing prototypes in the R&D department basement. They had their challenges: blasting an egg into space poses many difficulties. Getting unbroken eggs into space meant protecting them from the force of acceleration during rocket launch, as well as from vibrations that could kill developing chicks. Vellinger called their solution to the problem—a cradle to dampen the effects of vibration and acceleration—their “biggest accomplishment.”
Assuming the eggs arrived in space intact, their incubator had to maintain optimal temperature and humidity in the dry atmosphere inside the shuttle. They cracked the humidity problem with baggies and sponges. If the air grew too dry, the crew could periodically moisten a sponge and place it inside the incubator as needed. If the air proved too humid, an air pump could remove moisture. Throughout this process, Vellinger said, they hatched a lot of chicks in the basement of that Kentucky Fried Chicken lab. They also did reliability testing to ensure their gear wouldn’t break due to being used in space.9
Assuming the gear worked, Vellinger and Deuser had to decide what would go in the incubator’s thirty-two slots. They wanted every spot to count, so Vellinger boned up on embryology with a college course and drew on advice from KFC’s suppliers. He told me, “I was the one that actually candled the eggs before flight.” Egg candling, a technique used since ancient times, employs light—a candle in the early days, and later electric lamps—to reveal what’s under the shell. After some discussion they decided to send some embryos that were two days old and some that were nine days old to study the effects of microgravity at different phases of development. Back on Earth, they’d keep an identical set of eggs in an identical incubator. Both the space and control sets would be turned each day.
Their first experiment began and ended on January 28, 1986, when the Challenger exploded. Deuser, who came aboard to check on the experiment, was one of the last to leave the craft before lift-off. He and Vellinger watched the tragedy unfold firsthand. (At that very moment, a three-year-old Jordan Bimm, future space historian, was watching it on TV. It is his first memory.)
Three years later, Deuser and Vellinger had a second chance to send their experiment up on STS-29, space shuttle Discovery, which launched in 1989. The incubator again held thirty-two eggs, evenly divided between two-day-old and nine-day-old embryos. At the launch site, Vellinger watched the shuttle with his eggs go up. “It was surreal,” he said, “just to see your dream that you’ve worked on for so many years. To see it be actually enabled was super satisfying, super exciting, a real sense of accomplishment that all this time and hard work was paying off. My father was actually there to view the launch—my father gave me a big hug and started crying.”
Eventually, the results came in. The two-day-old embryos all died in different stages, proving that gravity did play a role in early development. Most of the nine-day-old embryos survived. Although some of them were dissected while still in the shell, researchers also hatched several, all for the sake of science. The first one to hatch was dubbed Kentucky and sent to live out its days at the Louisville Zoo. The other hatchlings ended up at city zoos in places like Chicago and Lafayette.
Vellinger and Deuser went on to create a business together, Techshot, which develops scientific gear for use in orbit. They have sent more than a few eggs into space at this point, along with other forms of technology, like a bone densitometer, which measures bone density. They are also working on a bioprinter that could use stem cells from humans (or chickens or eggs for that matter) for 3-D printing. The goal is to do 3-D printing of human organs in space for transplant. Imagine needing a kidney and being able to take your own genetic material and make one: that would be revolutionary. It must be done in space, naturally, because like melted plastic set into a mold, the organic material needs some time to toughen up. On Earth, it would simply collapse under its own weight. In 2020 they bioprinted a human knee meniscus in space. The following year, the commercial space infrastructure company Redwire acquired Techshot, where it joined seven other recently acquired space companies.10
On a purely selfish level, I hoped the results from the eggs-in-space experiments would answer scientific questions vital to me and to anyone else with ovaries. The organs do more than simply house eggs: ovaries release various forms of estrogen and progesterone, hormones that regulate the reproductive cycle, but also perform many other important functions, like activating osteoblast cells inside bones. Osteoblasts help form new bone cells and control the mineralization of bone. Since estrogen activates them, it makes sense that when estrogen levels drop during menopause, the risk of osteoporosis rises. That goes double for people who hit menopause early. More time spent in menopause means more time for your bones to lose their minerals and become brittle. (I confess, I find it odd to be a woman of a certain age, what doctors would call an “advanced maternal age” if I were pregnant, but whose menopause, caused by an oophorectomy, is considered “premature.”) Astronauts are like folks in surgical menopause: they experience abrupt bone loss. Well, in their legs at least. They also tend to gain bone in their forearms, probably from using them so much.11
Over the years, Dr. Steven Doty, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Special Surgery, a researcher whose work explores treatments for bone, cartilage, and connective tissue problems, worked with Deuser and Vellinger at Techshot to send quail eggs into space to study the problem of bone loss. In addition to people in menopause, people on bedrest also suffer from bone loss from inactivity. Astronauts spend plenty of their time in orbit exercising to help counteract the effects of microgravity. It’s not exactly clear what happens to bone density throughout the astronauts’ bodies, as NASA doesn’t release much information about their health. But, as Dr. Doty said, “ ‘If you don’t weight-bear, you lose bone,’ is a standard hypothesis.” Doty also said that the brief info he’d seen on folks who had been in space for extended times suggested that astronauts returning to Earth began to regain bone as they started to bear weight again but that this process stopped after about six months. “So their bone quality and quantity didn’t come back,” he said.12
Dr. Doty and Techshot saw this issue as an opportunity to use Techshot’s two-tiered incubator-centrifuge, which held thirty-six Japanese quail eggs. The equipment was compact and self-regulating—basically set it and forget it—which is key when astronauts have many duties. Techshot’s gear could even inject fixative into the eggs to preserve them at a particular stage of growth. The two tiers of the centrifuge allowed for interesting comparisons. For example, Techshot’s and Dr. Doty’s collaboration kept two sets of eggs in space, one in microgravity, the other spun in the centrifuge to simulate Earth’s gravity. One of their questions was whether quail embryos in microgravity continue to develop a skeletal system and, if so, whether the skeletal system is normal. They hoped it could lead to some insights about how human bone fractures heal too. Another investigator on the team, Dr. David Dickman, at Washington University’s Central Institute of the Deaf, would investigate the development of vestibular systems in the ear and their role in vertigo. Unfortunately, a combination of high g-force, heavy ion radiation from space, and vibration killed about half of the samples, making meaningful statistics impossible. The four embryos that did survive the return trip to Earth showed significantly less bone formation than the ground controls.13
For Techshot, it may have all started with an egg, but now their bone densitometer has completed 156 scans while orbiting Earth during several investigations exploring bone loss and muscle-wasting diseases and testing an antiosteoporosis drug in space mice. Still, as of 2021, trends in space research have drifted away from using animals because they require considerable crew time and attention, which are scarce resources. Dr. Doty explained that microgravity experiments in the fields of chemistry, engineering, and physics represent the most “promising” use of spaceflight.
Talking to the researchers filled me with optimism. Vellinger and Deuser spoke casually about life on Mars as if it were a near surety. The use of the word “space” before pretty much any other word still dazzles me. Space eggs. Space embryos. Space research. And yet, despite their optimism, from my layman’s armchair here on Earth, the results don’t sound too hopeful. Chicken embryos don’t develop well in space unless they are already a few days old, which bodes ill for space sex and space birth, as well as for renewable sources of space protein. (On the other hand, bioprinting cloned steak in space, which Techshot was investigating at the time of writing, might work.) Astronauts lose bone mass, which bodes ill for space bones and those in space menopause. Obviously, I’m no rocket scientist, but these obstacles feel insurmountable to me, at least to the limited extent of my knowledge. A space-clone kidney, uterus, or liver, on the other hand, gives me hope for medicine on Earth.14
We will certainly continue sending sacrifices into the skies: offerings to science, to optimism, to some god we pray will save us from climate catastrophe. But in the meantime, perhaps the environmentalists have been right all along: we have only one Earth. All our eggs are on this one planet, so we better stop being bastards and start treating it right.