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The four crew members of Inspiration4, the first ever all-civilian space mission, got genetically younger during their stay in space, a study has found. But the effects didn’t last long. Scientists are now trying to unravel how the space environment affects human DNA. 

Inspiration4 crew members had a packed schedule during their three-day trip to space in September 2021. Instead of just floating around in weightlessness and enjoying the breathtaking views from their modified Crew Dragon Resilience space capsule, they lent their bodies to science. 

Hayley Arceneaux, the mission’s the chief medical officer and trained physician assistant, was busy during their time orbit taking fingerpick blood samples and skin swabs of herself and her crewmates. A battery of tests followed their return to Earth and continued for several months after that. 

Results of these experiments have been published in three scientific papers in the journals Nature and Nature Communications on Tuesday, June 11. The tests showed that the space environment has fast-acting and profound effects on the human body, which can be detected in markers in blood after only a few hours in orbit. 

NASA, JAXA and the European Space Agency have previously conducted similar experiments with astronauts during long-duration stays on the International Space Station, but the Inspiration4 mission provided scientists with an opportunity to study the earliest stages of these space-induced processes in the human body.

Related: Inspiration4: The first all-civilian spaceflight on SpaceX Dragon

Chromosome caps getting longer

"We are getting closer to the point where we can almost measure the dose of space on the body," Chris Mason, a professor of genomics, physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine and lead author of two of the papers, told Space.com in an interview. "They were in space only for a few days, but we could already see early signatures of spaceflight exposure on the body including protein changes and gene expression changes."

For example, the researchers observed that markers indicating the aging of DNA decreased in space, making the crewmembers’ DNA appear younger and healthier. Those markers, known as telomeres, are caps that protect chromosomes that are known to shorten with age and due to environmental factors and stress. 

For the Inspiration4 participants, however, the telomeres got longer during the space mission. Scientists previously observed telomere lengthening in NASA astronaut Scott Kelly when they studied the effects of his one-year stay in orbit in 2015 on his body. The findings were already surprising back then as the researchers expected the opposite to happen due to the high levels of stress the organism is subject to in space. 

To see those effects in the Inspiration4 crew members after only a few days in space was even more unexpected, scientists say.

"We did see telomere elongation in all four of the crew members," Susan Bailey, a professor of radiation cancer biology and oncology at Colorado State University who led the research, said in a press conference presenting the papers on Monday, June 10. "It’s really a remarkable finding in a number of ways and helps us solidify our findings."

The researchers think the telomere elongation is triggered as a protective response by exposure to the higher radiation environment of space. Similar effects have been measured in mountain climbers after they scaled the world’s highest peaks. 

"We think it’s the DNA’s equivalent to hormesis," Mason said. "It’s the effect that we see when you stress the body, for example in the gym, your muscles get sore, but the body responds by building strength."

There is, however, a catch, said Bailey. After the astronauts’ return to Earth, the telomeres shrink almost immediately and get shorter than they were before the spaceflight. The researchers, Bailey said, don’t understand what triggers the shortening but hope they might be able to control the response in the future. 

"It takes a number of months for the telomeres to recover," Bailey said. "It’s one of the things that doesn’t quite get back to where you were when you started. We think that there is a real opportunity to think about long-term health outcomes for astronauts once they return to Earth and how we can better monitor and improve that outcome."

The shortening of the protective telomeres leads to DNA damage and makes individuals susceptible to a range of diseases including cancer, heart disease or immune system deficiency. Research, however, suggests that healthy diets and restorative practices such as meditation can help those chromosomal caps to recover.

Just like in astronauts in long duration mission, the bodies of Inspiration4 crew members showed other signs of aging during the spaceflight including increased markers for bone and muscle loss and brain stress. Those, however, returned to pre-flight levels within six months. Inspiration4 crew members Hayley Arceneaux and Chris Sembroski, who participated in the briefing didn’t seem to regret the degradation their telomeres suffered due to their space trip. 

"I was so happy to be able to contribute to science and I know that it was very important for all of our crew members," said Arceneaux.

Sembroski added: "It’s really humbling and honoring to be a part of this study. I don’t think any of our crew members really understood the full potential of what this mission was going to turn into, but it’s been incredible to see the impacts that have come from it." 

The study also found that the female crew members Arceneaux and geologist Sian Proctor recovered faster from the spaceflight with most of their health markers back at pre-flight levels faster than those of their male counterparts Sembroski and mission commander and benefactor Jared Isaacman. The results confirm observations in female NASA astronauts and suggest that female bodies may be better suited to endure the stresses of spaceflight. 

The data will be part of an open-access astronaut biological data repository, the Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA), which has also been published as part of the Nature package. The atlas contains data from long-duration space missions conducted by NASA, JAXA and ESA, and it’s a first-of-a-kind resource allowing researchers to compare and study in detail the many biological, physiological and genetic changes that can occur in humans during spaceflight. 

The researchers hope the database will enable them in the future to not only select people that are genetically best suited to endure the rigors of space travel, but also to devise strategies to improve the outcomes for those suited less. 

"We want to use this data to predict how people will respond to space at a physiological and molecular level," said Mason. "Eventually, we would like to find ways to boost their response, target some of the changes with a drug and help them, so that we don’t exclude anybody from going to space."

Mason, in fact, published a book in 2021 called "The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds," in which he makes a case for genetically engineering humans to make them better suited to explore and settle the solar system. He admits that the current state of knowledge is not sufficient to attempt any tempering with astronauts’ genomes. 

"We need probably another 20 years of data before I would even think we could have a good guess as to what to do," said Mason. "But this is the beginning of mapping out what changes to target, what to build new drugs around and what someday we can potentially do."

The research could also help medical scientists on Earth looking to find cures for genetic ailments that ruin lives of millions of children worldwide and for which there is currently no remedy.

The three studies in the journal Nature about these spaceflight-induced genetic changes crew can be found here, here and here.

For years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been unraveling what it asserts is a scam perpetrated by agents of North Korea, which used fake companies employing real IT workers to funnel money back to the regime’s military.

An American company played a key role in creating shell companies used as part of the scheme, a WIRED review of public records shows. Elected officials are now contemplating addressing loopholes in business-registration law that the scheme exposed.

In May, Wyoming secretary of state Chuck Gray revoked the business licenses of three companies linked to the North Korean scam: Culture Box LLC, Next Nets LLC, and Blackish Tech LLC. Gray said his office made the decision after receiving information from the FBI and conducting an investigation.

“The communist, authoritarian Kim Jong Un regime has no place in Wyoming,” Gray said in a May press release.

The companies posed as legitimate operations where businesses could hire contract workers to perform IT solutions, complete with fake websites featuring smiling photos of apparent employees. The companies all had one thing in common: Their incorporation documents were filed by a company called Registered Agents Inc., which says its global headquarters is in Sheridan, Wyoming.

Registered Agents, which provides incorporation services in every US state, takes the practice of business privacy to the extreme, and regularly uses fake personae to file formation documents with state agencies, a WIRED investigation previously found.

Culture Box LLC, one of the companies that Gray and the FBI linked to North Korea, listed “Riley Park” as the name of a Registered Agents employee on documents submitted to the Wyoming secretary of state. Park, according to several former employees of Registered Agents, is a fake persona that the company regularly used to file incorporation documents.

In a statement provided to WIRED, Registered Agents wrote, “The Wyoming Secretary of State dissolved the entities and we initiated the 30-day process to resign as their agent in mid-May. Ours and Wyoming’s processes to identify bad actors works. It strikes the best balance of individual privacy and business transparency supported by an entire ecosystem that cares about supporting entrepreneurs while rooting out the small percent of scammers.” The FBI’s St. Louis office, which led the investigation, did not respond to a request for comment.

The North Korean operation worked like this: Agents of the regime created fake companies purporting to be legitimate firms offering freelance IT services. Workers hired by North Koreans, or North Koreans themselves, would then perform legitimate contractor work, often using assumed identities.

In some instances, Americans would set up low-cost laptops with remote-access software, allowing North Korean workers to perform freelance IT work while appearing to use American IP addresses. The FBI referred to these Americans as “virtual assistants.”

The payments for the IT work were eventually funneled back to North Korea—where, the Department of Justice asserts, it was directed to the country’s Ministry of Defense and other agencies involved in WMD work. The scheme was so expansive that any company that hired freelance IT workers “more than likely” hired someone involved in the operation, according to FBI agent Jay Greenberg.

China has landed on the moon’s mysterious far side — again.

The robotic Chang’e 6 mission touched down inside Apollo Crater, within the giant South Pole-Aitken basin, at 6:23 a.m. Beijing Time on Sunday (June 2) , according to Chinese space officials. It was 6:23 p.m. EDT (2223 GMT) on June 1 at the time of the landing. The probe "successfully landed in the pre-selected area," China’s space agency said.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) now has two far-side landings under its belt — this one and Chang’e 4, which dropped a lander-rover combo onto the gray dirt in January 2019. No other country has done it once.

And Chang’e 6 will make further history for China, if all goes according to plan: The mission aims to scoop up samples and send them back to Earth, giving researchers their first-ever up-close looks at material from this part of the moon.

"The Chang’e-6 mission is the first human sampling and return mission from the far side of the moon," CNSA officials said in a translated statement. (To be clear: Chang’e 6 is a robotic, not crewed, mission.) "It involves many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty." 

Related: China’s Chang’e 6 mission has a big lunar mystery to solve

Sampling a new environment

Chang’e 6 launched on May 3 with a bold and unprecedented task: haul home samples from the moon’s far side, which always faces away from us. (The moon is tidally locked to Earth, completing one rotation on its axis in roughly the same amount of time it takes to orbit our planet. So observers here on Earth always see the same side of our natural satellite.)

Every lunar surface mission before Chang’e 4 targeted the near side, largely because that area is easier to explore. It’s harder to communicate with robots operating on the far side, for example; doing so generally requires special relay orbiters, which China launched ahead of both Chang’e 4 and Chang’e 6. China’s newest moon relay satellite, called Queqiao-2, aided the Chang’e 6 landing, CNSA officials said.

Chang’e 6 arrived in lunar orbit about four days after liftoff. It spent the next few weeks scrutinizing its planned landing site and gearing up for today’s big event, which went according to plan: Chang’e 6’s lander came down softly in Apollo Crater, leaving the mission’s orbiter, with its attached Earth-reentry module, circling the moon.

The lander will spend the next few days studying its surroundings and collecting about 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) of lunar dirt and rock. Some of these samples will be scooped from the surface and some will be dug from up to 6.5 feet (2 meters) underground, using Chang’e 6’s onboard drill.

This material will then be launched into lunar orbit by a rocket that rode down with the lander. The sample container will rendezvous with the Chang’e 6 orbiter, then make the long trek back to Earth, eventually touching down here under parachutes on June 25.

Chang’e 6 is also carrying a tiny moon rover and has a variety of scientific experiments onboard the lander.

Scientists will study the returned material in detail, seeking insights about the moon’s history and evolution and clues about why the lunar far side is so different than the near. The dark volcanic seas known as maria are common on the near side, for example, but are rare on the far side, for reasons that remain mysterious.

Researchers will doubtless compare the Chang’e 6 material to the samples collected on the moon’s near side by Chang’e 5, which came down to Earth in December 2020. (Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 are sister missions, with virtually identical architectures.)

Related: The moon: Everything you need to know

Big lunar dreams

The Chang’e moon program, which is named after the Chinese moon goddess, has launched increasingly complex and ambitious missions over the past 17 years.

Chang’e 1 and Chang’e 2 sent orbiters to the moon in 2007 and 2010, respectively. Chang’e 3 marked China’s first trip to the lunar surface, putting a lander-rover duo on the near side in late 2013. Chang’e 4 landed a similar pair on the far side in early 2019. Chang’e 5-T1 launched a test capsule around the moon and back to Earth in 2014, proving out the gear that could get lunar samples here safely, which Chang’e 5 did in late 2020.

And there are more missions to come. Chang’e 7 is scheduled to launch in 2026 to assess the resource potential of the moon’s south polar region, which is thought to harbor large stores of water ice. Chang’e 8, which will lift off two years later, will test ways to use those resources on-site — building a structure out of lunar dirt and rock, for example.

And all of this robotic work will lead to something even bigger, if all goes according to plan: crewed missions to the moon, which China aims to start launching by 2030. The nation wants to build an astronaut outpost near the south pole called the International Lunar Research Station later in the 2030s, with help from partners such as Russia, Belarus and Pakistan.

The United States has similar aims with its Artemis program, which is targeting late 2026 for its first crewed lunar landing. The U.S. is also building a moon-exploration coalition via a diplomatic framework called the Artemis Accords; more than 40 nations have signed on to date.