Elon Musk is about to bring a marijuana plant into space

SpaceX, the billionaire Elon Musk's launch and launch company, will bring marijuana and coffee plants to the International Space Station in March.

This is a joint operation between SpaceX and a research lab in Colorado, USA. Of course, these cannabis plants don't leave astronauts "high" in space, but rather serve a real scientific experiment, testing what happens to plants in a zero-gravity environment.

Elon Musk smoked marijuana during a radio broadcast - (Image: Internet).

Specifically, 480 samples of plant cell cultures will be sent to space on SpaceX CRS-20 cargo flight, which will be launched to ISS in March 2020. After that, these plants will be transferred to ISS and they will live in a special incubator for 30 days.

A team of astronauts and ground crew will follow what happens to the samples before they are brought back to Earth a month later.

After returning to Earth, the scientists will examine samples to see how exposure to micro-radiation and space may have altered plant gene expression.

"This is one of the first human studies on the effect of microgravity and spatial light on the cultivation of cannabis and coffee cells. There is a scientific view that supports the theory that plants in space of mutant experience. This is an opportunity to see if the mutations will be retained when returning to earth or not and whether there is a new commercial application or not, " said Dr. Jonathan Vaught, co-founder and Front Range Bioscatics' CEO said the significance of this experiment.