Plans by a Kentucky Company to study Hemp on Space Underway
Last year, the access to hemp was legally opened up by the 2018 farm bill condition that the THC content in CBD products should not exceed 0.3%. However, Cannabis research remains one of the toughest challenges for an industry dogged by the Schedule-I status of the plant.
To capitalize on research, Space Tango, a Kentucky company, has plans to take its hemp exploration into orbit. This Lexington Company will take a small hemp plant crop to the International Space Station on April 30 this year, aboard SpaceX17.
Space Tango bio engineering enterprise will work with the Anavii Market CBD retailer along Atalo Holdings hemp cultivator to carry out the research.
As announced by Kris Kimel, the chairman and co-founder of Space Tango, the experiment is meant to give lessons about how the hemp plant biologically and physically grows to produce and develop cannabinoids among other chemical constituents. This study will hopefully bring out solutions and applications useful on earth.
During the previous fall, a Tango subsidiary was formed to focus on hemp research specifically.
Joe Chappell Kentucky College of Pharmaceutical Sciences’ chairman, and a Space Tango Science Advisory team member joined Kimel on a webinar and talked of the experiment’s potential in further discovering rugs more so now that the DEA and the FDA have signalled that they will work with compounds derived from hemp.
Chappell echoed on the significance of understanding the manner in which plants behave in an environment with no traditional stress of gravity as knowing this can give more insights into the manner in which adaptations are created and how researchers can take advantages of those changes to discover new traits characteristics, efficacy, and biomedical adaptations.
The Space Tango team has already carried out like an experiment in Space, the most remarkable one being a partnership with Anheuser-Busch that studies barley growth aboard the ISS. On other recent Periwinkle and Valeriana plant studies in orbit by Tango, the profiling of the experiment’s findings is underway, and formal results will come out soon.
As to Space Hemp experiments: Chappell indicated that the delegated team would closely monitor the development of the cannabinoid at the ISS. Studies on the experiment plants will be done at research and development labs of the space station for six weeks and later returned to earth for further analysis.
