Milestone in space reproduction

 

In a pioneering move toward enabling independent life beyond Earth, Dutch biotech-aerospace company SpaceBorn United has confirmed the successful launch and data return from the world’s first IVF minilab prototype designed specifically for human reproduction research in space.

The mission – launched 21 April 2025 on SpaceX’s Bandwagon-3 – marks the first time a system engineered to support early stages of human reproduction has been deployed in orbit.

Spaceborn says this marks an important step toward realising ARTIS (Assisted Reproductive Technology In Space), a fully automated IVF minilab designed to safely enable conception and early embryonic development in space. It also lays critical groundwork for independent future human settlements beyond Earth, and advancements in fertility treatments on Earth.

Telemetry confirmed that ARTIS’ core systems – including its custom-designed microfluidic device and life-support systems – survived the stresses of launch and orbital deployment intact.

Onboard yeast cultures (in subsequent missions, mouse embryos will be used) survived successfully, validating key life support mechanisms with onboard sensors and images confirming all internal components remained secured and operational despite partial visual degradation.

“This is a milestone for SpaceBorn United and has opened a new chapter in reproductive space science,” said Dr Egbert Edelbroek, CEO of SpaceBorn United. “For the first time, hardware built specifically to enable stages of human reproduction in space has been tested in space."

Although no human biological material was included in this inaugural flight, the ARTIS minilab has been designed to provide the pressure, temperature and microfluidic processes essential for IVF and early embryo development.

The minilab was developed in collaboration with UK-based Frontier Space Technologies, using subsystems from its autonomous ‘lab-in-a-box’ technology.

Dr Angelo Vermeulen, CTO at SpaceBorn, stated: “This first systems test in space is the start of our aim to reshape the future of human reproduction, both in space and on Earth. It shows that our approach is technically feasible and ready to take the next steps.”

The next mission, expected in early 2026, is now in full development and will focus on sending mouse embryos to space to validate a further matured ARTIS prototype.

Eventually the ARTIS minilab will enable conception in space – once in orbit around Earth, micro pumps will reallocate sperm cells to oocytes to cause fertilisation.

The goal, according to Spaceborn, is to enable early embryo development up to the blastocyst stage and identify beneficial processes that improve IVF on Earth.

In these upcoming missions – currently in preparation with new commercial space launchers, including Sidereus in Italy and Skyroot in India – critical data on both the embryos and the technical system will be collected in real-time and analysed again after their return to Earth.

About SpaceBorn United SpaceBorn United is the first organisation dedicated to enabling human conception and subsequent stages of reproduction in space.

Founded in the Netherlands, the company merges biotech, reproductive medicine, aerospace engineering and ethical oversight to develop the world’s first Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) designed for off-Earth environments.

Its work also accelerates innovation in IVF practices for use on Earth, offering hope and new options for families everywhere.

SpaceBorn United closely collaborates with various research and industry partners in Europe, the US and Asia. The company is supported by an international team of leading experts.

An end to Brexit's tiresome rhetoric

 

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's ‘EU reset’ deal this week is to be welcomed as a positive and long-overdue step in the right direction.

But in its wake, the usual chorus of Brexit hardliners – Nigel Farage, Richard Tice, Kemi Badenoch and Boris Johnson – have emerged from the shadows, decrying it as a betrayal of British sovereignty.

As usual, their criticisms ring hollow and lack substance when juxtaposed with the tangible benefits and potential the deal offers compared to the stark realities and damage of Brexit's aftermath.

It’s a pragmatic step forward, marking a significant stride in mending the UK's fractured relationship with the European Union.

Key components include:

• Defence cooperation – renewed collaboration on security and defence initiatives enhances the UK's role in European stability and strengthens joint responses to global threats.
• Economic boost – the agreement is projected to add £9 billion to the UK economy by 2040, primarily through streamlined trade in agrifoods and electricity.
• Reintegration into Erasmus – British students will once again have access to the Erasmus programme, fostering educational and cultural exchange.
• Eased travel – UK travellers will benefit from faster e-gate access in EU countries, reducing airport delays.
• Energy cooperation – rejoining the EU's internal energy market could save UK consumers £37 billion annually.

Hardliners have lambasted the deal, labelling it as "rule-taking" and a “surrender of sovereignty”, desperately clinging to their failed narrative and arguments of the past.

Take fishing rights, for example. While the deal extends EU fishing access to UK waters for 12 years, it does not increase quotas or change what was previously agreed. The concession does, however, facilitate broader economic gains, including the resumption of UK shellfish exports.

And on regulatory alignment. Aligning with EU food standards reduces red tape, benefiting UK exporters and consumers alike. This is a pragmatic choice, not a capitulation, and has been widely welcomed by British businesses already.

The original Brexit vision pledged control, prosperity and a so-called return to ‘sovereignty’. But nearly a decade on the evidence tells a very different story.

Economic self-harm – since Brexit, the UK economy has haemorrhaged an estimated £100 billion a year in lost output. Business investment stalled and labour markets have been squeezed.

Export chaos – once-proud British industries, such as fishing and agriculture, were hit hardest. UK seafood exports to Europe slumped by over 25 percent, with shellfish sellers facing insurmountable trade barriers. This, despite being one of the sectors Brexit was supposedly meant to “liberate”.

Immigration irony – and those claims about controlling immigration? Reality bites hard. Net migration hit a record 728,000 in the year to June 2024 – not from the EU, but from countries further afield. The end of free movement didn’t mean fewer arrivals, just a more chaotic and costly system to manage them.

As many predicted – including this writer – the so-called 'Brexit dividend' quickly turned out to be a mirage of false promises.

And yet, the likes of Farage in his reinvented Reform party and his fellow hardliners continue to peddle the same tired slogans – blind to the economic wreckage, indifferent to the lived experience of working people and unwilling to engage with reality.

That’s why Keir Starmer’s reset deal deserves more than a cautious welcome – it deserves recognition as a long-overdue, grown-up intervention.

Refreshingly, it sets aside chest-thumping ideology in favour of cooperation, stability and mutual benefit. It restores damaged channels of trade, mobility and trust – and offers a way back towards international relevance.

Predictably, the billionaire-owned right-wing press have gone into full outrage mode. But beyond the headlines and faux fury, a quieter truth is emerging – much of the country is ready to move on.

Businesses are relieved. Students are hopeful. Travellers and exporters see a future with fewer pointless obstacles.

This deal isn’t about reversing Brexit – it’s about repairing what was broken. And if Farage and friends find that uncomfortable, it’s only because they no longer have a credible argument to make.

Their Brexit dream has failed. The rest of us are ready to refocus and look to the future.

When climate fiction feels real

 

Humanity’s climate emergency no longer lurks in some distant, abstract future. It is encroaching – slowly and unevenly – into our daily lives, politics and psychology.

We are living in a time when yesterday’s dystopias are starting to feel like tomorrow’s headlines, and the Danish TV drama Families Like Ours, which I’ve just finished watching (BBC 4 and iPlayer), could hardly be timelier.

Set in a recognisably near-future world, the series imagines a country that will soon become unliveable due to rising sea levels. 

The nation is forced to evacuate in order to avoid the worst effects of climate collapse – an unsettling premise that turns the tables on our assumptions about migration, power, and privilege.

These are not just speculative ideas for me. Similar themes – a fractured country grappling with inundation, social disintegration and a creeping authoritarianism born of environmental breakdown – are explored in my own forthcoming novel.

Watching Families Like Ours, I felt as though I was viewing an alternative version of my own future world – an unsettling “what if”, unfolding not in an alien realm or distant century but just around the next political and climatic corner.

Drama of denial

What’s particularly powerful – and is also noted in The Guardian’s excellent review – is the drama’s restraint in the midst of crisis.

There are no Hollywood-style disasters, no CGI tsunamis or blazing infernos. The apocalypse arrives in the form of an official government directive urging people to evacuate for their own good.

It’s slow, procedural and quietly bureaucratic – a polite but chilling, “Leave while you still can”. It’s not the bang of destruction but the whimper of compliance.

As the review puts it: “The creeping horror comes from how normal everyone is trying to pretend it all is.”

That line haunted me because in many ways it captures the most terrifying part of our own present: the societal impulse to look away from impending disaster.

Denial – especially around the politics of human-driven climate change – is one of the most potent forces of our age. It manifests not only in outright scepticism, but in the performative optimism of politicians and social media commentators, the greenwashing of corporations and the general inertia of daily life.

We’re encouraged to adapt, to “build back better”, to install air conditioning or move to higher ground – all without seriously confronting the root causes or long-term consequences.

In my upcoming novel Flood Waters Down, I explore how denial calcifies into something darker: a form of authoritarianism cloaked in pragmatism. When people become desperate for security, they often look to ideology, to borders, to technological fixes and political scapegoats.

The regime that emerges in my novel doesn’t rise through a coup. It grows organically, incrementally, from the fertile soil of fear, apathy, and obscene wealth.

That’s the genius of Families Like Ours. It shows how easily we might slide into such a world – not with jackboots and firestorms but via polite emails, official notices and a quietly panicking population.

Climate as character

Another powerful parallel is how the environment itself becomes a kind of character – not a passive backdrop, but an active force that shapes events, relationships and identities.

For the Danish series, the land is turning against its people. It’s no longer safe or reliable, forcing individuals and families to make choices they never imagined – not just about where they live but about who they are.

In this context, Flood Waters Down uses the English Fens as a landscape transformed by flooding into a waterlogged no-man’s-land of shifting loyalties and fragile settlements.

It is at once beautiful and treacherous, steeped in memory and myth, but altered beyond recognition. My characters must navigate not just physical terrain but the moral geography of a broken society.

A question that looms large in both the TV drama and climate fiction like mine is: who gets to stay, and who is forced to go?

In Families Like Ours, the reversal of current refugee and migration narratives is pointed. Suddenly, it is affluent Europeans who must flee. The usual script is flipped, inviting viewers to reconsider the racial, economic, and geopolitical dynamics of climate migration.

By contrast, Flood Waters Down focuses on those who are left behind. Those who remain in the Fens – whether by choice, circumstance or resistance – are seen as dangerous or irrelevant by the centralised regime. The government has moved on. Sovereign individuals are given free rein, exploiting the fears of the wealthy.

The people left behind, ghosted from the national narrative, become the seedbed of something new – an insurgent hope, a counterculture rooted in resilience and memory.

Not all of them are heroes. Some are lost, vengeful, morally compromised. But they refuse to disappear. They refuse to comply with the tidy story of evacuation and erasure.

And maybe that’s what climate fiction, at its best, can offer. Not just warnings but alternatives. Not just despair but a glimpse of the radical imagination we’ll need to survive – and adapt.

Edge of reality

Stories about what the future has in store matter because they help us feel the unfolding crisis – not just understand it intellectually but inhabit it emotionally. What would you do? How would you respond? What would you cling to, and what would you let go of?

Climate fiction is not about predicting the future with accuracy. It’s about preparing ourselves with clarity and courage to meet what materialises. And it may yet prove to be one of our most powerful tools in confronting the climate emergency.

The Danish drama ends not with neat resolution but with the unsettling knowledge that something has irrevocably changed – and that our familiar categories of nation, family, identity and home may no longer apply.

Flood Waters Down concludes too not with triumph but with possibility. With characters who have chosen to fight for a different kind of future, even as the old world sinks beneath the waterline and a new, uncertain one begins to emerge.

The climate emergency is already here. The question is: what stories will we tell about it – and what kind of world will we shape in its wake?

Space junk pollution

 

Thousands of satellites that burn up in Earth’s atmosphere are leaving more than just streaks of light in the sky.

A groundbreaking study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres has revealed that dying satellites – those burning up on re-entry after completing their missions in orbit – are releasing pollutants that could have alarming consequences for both the climate and ozone layer.

As satellite megaconstellations grow exponentially, the problem is no longer confined to a niche realm of astrophysics. It’s rapidly becoming a global environmental issue.

Today, there are more than 9,000 satellites orbiting Earth and by 2040 that number is predicted to swell to over 60,000. The driving force behind this growth is the rapid deployment of government and commercial satellite constellations, primarily for broadband internet coverage by companies such as SpaceX and Amazon.

But, as the saying goes, what goes up must come down – and when these satellites complete their missions after relatively short lifetimes, they are routinely deorbited to burn up in the atmosphere.

While this may seem like a tidy solution, it’s anything but clean. The study, led by atmospheric scientist Jamie Shutler and colleagues, finds that re-entering satellites release thousands of tonnes of metal particles into the stratosphere every year.

Chief among these is aluminum oxide (Al₂O₃), a substance with the potential to alter temperature patterns and disrupt delicate atmospheric chemistry.

The authors estimate that by 2040 as many as 10,000 metric tonnes of aluminum oxide could be entering the upper atmosphere annually. This figure represents a staggering increase compared to today’s levels and signals a future where human-made atmospheric contamination could rival or exceed that of natural processes like volcanic eruptions.

Aluminum oxide is no benign byproduct. According to the study, its presence can cause localised heating of up to 1.5C in the middle and upper atmosphere.

“These temperature changes could disrupt wind patterns and other critical dynamics of the stratosphere,” the authors warn.

Perhaps more disturbingly, these disruptions could delay the recovery of the ozone layer – a thin but vital shield that protects life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation.

In an unusually short three paragraph article on its website The Guardian, in summarising the findings, quotes Shutler as saying: “This is a new, emerging chemical pathway that is completely anthropogenic. We are fundamentally changing the chemistry of the atmosphere in a way that has not been considered before.”

The satellite industry has long viewed atmospheric re-entry as a convenient and eco-friendly solution to space junk. But as this study makes clear, the process may be quietly shifting the baseline of Earth’s climate systems.

Particles produced during re-entry are not merely disbursed and forgotten. Instead, they form persistent aerosols that can act as radiative agents – essentially reflecting or trapping heat – while also playing a role in catalysing chemical reactions that destroy ozone.

Aluminum is not the only concern. The study also highlights the release of other metals such as titanium, iron, copper, and lithium – all of which have their own complex chemical interactions and unknown long-term impacts.

The exact consequences of this metallised upper atmosphere are still being modelled, but early signs point to a troubling new front in humanity’s planetary impact.

Researchers also note the increasing role of some rocket launches, particularly from private companies, which contribute additional pollutants like black carbon. Such compounds rise into the stratosphere, where they can remain for years, compounding the problem.

A 2022 study by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warned that soot from rockets alone could increase stratospheric temperatures and disrupt polar vortexes. The new satellite re-entry data adds another layer to this growing concern.

Ironically, many of the satellites responsible for these emissions are part of systems designed to monitor and combat climate change. In attempting to connect the world and collect vital environmental data, we may be undermining the very systems that sustain life on Earth.

The implications of the study are sobering. The scientific community and regulatory bodies have, until now, paid scant attention to the effects of mass satellite re-entry. That’s likely to change. As one of the study’s co-authors bluntly put it: “We’re geoengineering the stratosphere without realising it.”

So, what now? The researchers call for urgent reforms to how we manage satellite end-of-life processes.

Alternatives could include designing spacecraft with minimal pollutant output on re-entry, retrieving and disposing of satellites differently, or even developing reusable systems that don’t require destructive descent at all.

These options will require international cooperation and new frameworks for space governance – something the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space has only recently begun to explore.

Earth’s climate crisis has taught us at least one painful lesson: seemingly invisible emissions, once dismissed or underestimated, can have catastrophic consequences. Now, with space becoming the next industrial frontier, we must apply that lesson to the skies above.

Satellites may be our eyes in the heavens, but their burning remains are falling into our future. The time to act is now, while we still have the tools to prevent a new kind of environmental crisis.

As the paper’s authors conclude: “The cumulative effect of satellite re-entries must be taken seriously as part of Earth’s changing atmospheric budget.”

If we fail to heed this warning, the sky itself may become the next casualty of human excess.

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Article references:

Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres - Investigating the Potential AtmosphericAccumulation and Radiative Impact of the Coming Increase in Satellite ReentryFrequency 

The Guardian - Dying satellites can drive climate change and ozone depletion