Chinese astronauts harvest first batch of rice grown aboard Tiangong space station

Chinese astronauts aboard the Tiangong space station have harvested the first batch of rice grown in orbit.

This marks a step towards developing food production systems for future long-duration space missions.

According to Chinese state media, the rice seeds were transported to the Tiangong space station on the Shenzhou-23 mission, which launched on May 24. After more than two months of cultivation, astronauts Zhu Yangzhu, Zhang Zhiyuan and Lai Ka-ying harvested the crop and stored the samples for further research.

The experiment builds on China's 2022 achievement, when astronauts completed the world's first full life-cycle rice cultivation experiment in space. During that mission, six rice seeds spent 120 days aboard Tiangong and produced 59 space-grown seeds that were later returned to Earth for analysis.

For the current experiment, scientists are growing two types of japonica rice: ordinary seeds that have never been to space and seeds descended from rice grown aboard Tiangong in 2022.

Researchers aim to determine whether food can be produced entirely in space, reducing the need for regular supplies from Earth during future missions to destinations such as the Moon and Mars.

The experiment also seeks to study how microgravity affects rice across multiple generations. Scientists are attempting to grow two successive generations of rice in orbit, from seed to plant and then from the newly produced seeds to another crop.

The study uses four cultivation units containing six rice seeds each. One group follows the conventional seed-to-seed reproduction cycle, while the second uses ratooning, a method in which new shoots grow from the remaining roots after the first harvest.

In addition to collecting rice grains, the astronauts have preserved stems and leaves at low temperatures. The samples will be returned to Earth for analysis to help scientists better understand plant growth in space and improve future space farming techniques.