If you want an astronaut to run your experiment alongside their many other responsibilities, keeping it simple is the key.
On 25 July, an experiment that Charles Cockell had spent years planning blasted into space. A SpaceX rocket blasted off from Florida, heading to the International Space Station (ISS). It carried 18 bioreactors, each the size of a deck of cards, that would be used to study whether bacteria could mine useful minerals on the Moon, Mars or asteroids.
Getting the experiment off the ground (literally) was “one of the most exciting things I’ve experienced”, says Cockell, an astrobiologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. But the process of getting from proposal to lift-off can be long and involved: Cockell’s biomining experiment was more than 11 years in the making. Read more in Nature.