Camila Mota

And in order for that to happen, it's not just about trying to make sure that we could get adequate food supply, but also that we can reproduce.

And otherwise, for example, you'd always have to be going back to Earth to get more people.

No.

No, they didn't.

That might be the future research, Marnie.

But this was all carried out in an Earth-based lab.

So what they did is they used sperm samples from humans, mice and pigs and they put them in a machine that mimics microgravity.

It's called a clinostat and it rotates to get rid of the direction of gravitational pull and causes cells to not really get which direction they're travelling in.

They then put them in a maze that simulated the female reproductive tract and checked if they could get through to an egg.

And what did they find?

Could the sperm navigate the maze?

So the sperm in this simulated microgravity, basically 40% fewer made it through compared to the control group.

With human sperm, there was no egg there for ethical reasons.

For pigs and mice, they did put an egg there.

And they found that even the embryo then developed, if they did make it to the end, was impacted because of their exposure to microgravity.

Yeah, it does paint a pretty worrying picture.

And it seems that those embryos that were exposed to simulated microgravity had a different number of fetal cells in the embryo.

But the researchers said that thankfully, while some embryos were negatively impacted, there were others that were healthy.

And so there is some hope that we might one day be able to reproduce in space.

So the senior author of the paper did say that the research is helping us to better understand how sperm navigate space.