Nov. 20, 2025, 11:00 AM ESTBy Denise ChowFor nine months in 2022, moss lived in space. It wasn’t in a lab aboard the International Space Station, like other gardening experiments conducted in orbit — rather, the moss was attached to the station’s exterior, fully exposed to the harsh environment of the cosmos.The purpose of the space moss test, reported in a study published Thursday in the journal iScience, was to see if moss — an early land plant capable of thriving in some of the most extreme environments on Earth — could survive long-term exposure to the vacuum of space.Surprisingly, the researchers found that the moss spores not only endured, they “retained their vitality” and were still capable of reproducing when they eventually returned to Earth.“Most living organisms, including humans, cannot survive even briefly in the vacuum of space,” Tomomichi Fujita, the study’s lead author and a professor in the department of biological sciences at Hokkaido University in Japan, said in a statement.“This provides striking evidence that the life that has evolved on Earth possesses, at the cellular level, intrinsic mechanisms to endure the conditions of space,” he added.