South Africa's Rooibos Seeds Are Headed to the International Space Station

The red bush is going to space, of all places. The South African Rooibos Council, with a company called MaxIQ Space handling the logistics, is sending rooibos seeds to the International Space Station. Launch is set for October 2026, and the seeds come home in December or the new year, having spent at least six weeks in a small nanolab, held in microgravity and left open to cosmic radiation the whole while.

"The seeds will be the first indigenous South African species, and the first seeds from the African continent, to go to space," SARC director Dawie de Villiers told AFP. Home again, they will be planted next to a control group that never left the ground, and more than a dozen students, part of a schools science program, will keep watch over both: which germinates, which grows, and whether weightlessness left any mark at all. It is a patient sort of study, the kind that asks you to plant, wait, and compare, which is fitting for a plant that has never been in a hurry.

For a reader meeting the plant for the first time: it is a modest crop with an outsized reach, some 22,000 tons grown a year, about half of it staying home and the rest travelling to more than fifty countries, Japan and the western European markets chief among them. The plant, Aspalathus linearis, has carried EU protected-origin status since 2021, and it still keeps almost entirely to one address, the Cederberg, in the mountains of the Western Cape. It is a fussy thing about its home ground. Whether it will be equally particular about weightlessness is, for now, an open question.

So the seeds will make their trip, spend their six weeks aloft, and return to the same soil that has always suited them. We will wait, as we tend to, and see what the students find.

Sources: phys.org, "South Africa's rooibos heads to space"; Eyewitness News, "South Africa's rooibos heads to space".