Frozen Sperm Retains Its Viability in Outer Space Conditions, Claims Research

It seems that space conquest could be done without any help from 'man'kind. Women could very well be sent to space with a selection of sperm ready to populate other plants, researchers have now claimed. It could be good news for people like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos who see the colonization of space as the only answer to Earth's depleting resources. The new study has found that human sperm retains its complete viability within the different gravitational conditions found in outer space.

According to researchers at the Dexeus women's health centre in Barcelona, frozen sperm could actually be transported to space to create possible human sperm bank outside Earth, says a report published in Daily Mail. As such the revelation means, male astronauts could very well become redundant as they could be replaced by all-women teams in outer space.

In the study, reported at the 5th Annual Meeting of ESHRE, investigators pointed out that the lack of difference in characteristics observed in frozen sperm samples exposed to microgravity and those maintained in ground conditions open possibilities of safely transporting sperm to space and consider, "possibility of creating a human sperm bank outside Earth."

The analysis by the researchers based on fertility testing methods (including concentration, motility, vitality, morphology and DNA fragmentation) found no difference whatsoever in any of the parameters between the microgravity space samples and control group samples from Earth. The results were presented by Dr Montserrat Boada from Dexeus Women's Health in Barcelona, whose group worked with microgravity engineers from the Polytechnic University of Barcelona. The Aeroclub Barcelona-Sabadell of Spain was responsible for the parabolic flights to create microgravity conditions.

The study comes close at the heels of NASA publishing a paper arguing single-sex crews are best for cohesion and women are more likely to be co-operative.

Dr Boada described this as a preliminary study and her group will now move on to validate the results and then to larger sperm samples, longer periods of microgravity and even fresh sperm.