So far, that’s about as close as NASA has gotten to the subject of GM astronauts-one that still hasn’t been broached in any official agency document. His lab participates in NASA’s Twins Study, which is tracking physiological changes to an astronaut who was sent to the International Space Station for a year while his twin brother stayed on Earth. Mason says there’s a decade or two of work left just to find out what effect space travel has on your genes, and which ones might be okay to change and which should be on a “do not disturb” list. “We don’t know if it’s a slight nudge to existing gene expression, or a whole new chromosome, or finally a complete rewriting of the genetic code.” “I think we have to consider it for people that we send to other planets,” he says. In it, genetic modification plays a big role. In 2011, Mason came up with what he called a “ 500-year plan” to get humans off Earth. One person looking at the idea is Christopher Mason, a member of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine. Can they be made radiation-proof? Can they be rejiggered to produce their own vitamins and amino acids? Experiments have begun to alter human cells in the lab. But some far-out ideas once relegated to science fiction and TED Talks ( here and here) have recently started to take concrete form. No one is trying to grow an astronaut in a bubbling vat somewhere. That’s right: genetically modified astronauts. Recently, a few scientists have started to explore whether we might be able to do a little better if we created new types of humans more fit for the travails of space travel. Bathed in radiation and with nothing growing on it, the Red Planet is basically a graveyard. In fact, the Mars journey would likely be a dead end. But it was short on how any of those colonists would survive.

Musk’s speech was long on orbits, flight plans, and fuel costs. In the film Gattaca, actor Ethan Hawke played a genetic “in-valid” who hopes to travel space against the odds.Īt the International Astronautical Congress last September, in Guadalajara, Mexico, Elon Musk convinced many die-hard space engineers he could get a fleet of private rockets filled with thousands of people to Mars.

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