NASA astronaut Scott Kelly aboard the habitable artificial satellite: International Space Station and posted a close-up of an orange zinnia flower, the first ever grown in space. The space station has its own plant growth facility where the astronauts have been growing plants of their own.
Pettit’s sunflower, with its bright yellow petals (before they wilted), was the first flower grown aboard the International Space Station. It was not however, the first flower grown in space.
Prior to the space station, NASA’s space shuttle missions were just too short to grow flowers from seeds, but in the 1990s, cosmonauts grew dwarf wheat stalks through their full lifecycle — including flowering — on Russia’s space station Mir. Before that, Soviet cosmonauts attempted to use a small greenhouse to cultivate orchids on the Salyut 6 station, but only those plants that were already budding when they were delivered to the outpost ever did bloom.
Surprisingly enough, the Guinness Book of World Records includes an entry for the “first species of plant to flower in space.”
In 1966, the Soviet biosciences space probe Cosmos 110 launched with two dogs (named Veterok and Ugolyok) and several species of plants on a 22-day uncrewed mission.
“Seeds had been moisturized on entry to orbit… but haricot beans germinated poorly,” authors Brian Harvey and Olga Zakutnyaya described in their 2011 book, “Russian Space Probes: Scientific Discoveries and Future Missions” (2011, Springer). “Those that did grow developed sooner, faster and flowered twice more than controls.”
Picture Credit : Google
