Something is growing inside the International Space Station — and the moment NASA astronaut Don Pettit posted a photo of it, the internet completely lost its mind.
Viewers were convinced they were looking at a hatching alien egg straight out of a 1979 horror film, with panicked commenters begging astronauts to “kill it with fire.”
The truth? It’s a potato. Pettit had been quietly nurturing a purple spud — cheekily dubbed “Spudnik-1” — during his off-duty hours as part of a personal space gardening hobby, anchoring it with Velcro inside a makeshift grow-light terrarium.
As it turns out, potatoes are among the least efficient crops in space, with roots sprawling in all directions thanks to microgravity and plants growing far slower than they would on Earth.
But the experiment is more than just a cosmic party trick — with NASA’s Artemis moon mission and future Mars expeditions on the horizon, finding sustainable food sources for long-haul space travel is becoming a critical challenge.
Finnish startup Solar Foods is even partnering with the European Space Agency to develop a novel space food derived from urine, hoping to finally free the ISS from its costly dependence on provisions shipped up from Earth.
