Space mice give astronauts fertility hope

FEARS that space travel could damage fertility and hinder a long-term mission to Mars have been allayed after healthy mice were born from sperm stored in the International Space Station (ISS) for nine months.

Astronauts on board the ISS are bombarded by huge levels of radiation, causing fears it could kill or mutate sperm and pose serious reproductive problems for the first colonists or those travelling in space for extended periods. Nasa is so concerned about the damage from radiation that it now offers egg and sperm freezing.

However, when researchers at the University of Yamanashi in Japan fertilised eggs with sperm that had been kept on the ISS for 288 days, they found no difference between the pups born through the procedure and a control group. Teruhiko Wakayama, the lead author, said: “Although sperm DNA was slightly damaged during space preservation, it could be repaired by the egg and did not impair the birth rate or normality of the offspring. Our results demonstrate that generating human or domestic animal offspring from space-preserved sperm is a possibility, which should be useful when the ‘space age’ arrives.”

The Mars One mission is scheduled to land its first crew on the planet in 2025. The new study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.