Maiden Flight

Contributors | Rachel Soo Hoo Smith, Felix Kraemer, and Neri Oxman

Maiden Flight is an autonomous biological laboratory environment designed for studying the impact of space flight on the reproductive nucleus of a bee colony. The Mediated Matter Group launched two laboratory capsules on Blue Origin’s suborbital rocket, New Shepard. Each custom-designed metabolic support capsule comprised an experimental environment for one queen bee and an attending retinue of 10 nurse bees for a parabolic flight to a 100-kilometer micro-gravitational space apogee, and back.

One mated queen bee embodies the laying potential for a quarter of a million bees in her lifetime, along with the genetic and behavioral instructions to generate the structure and eusociality of a hive. During the flight, the regulatory tasks intended to maintain the queen’s metabolic processes were designed to be dynamically shared by retinue bees and human-made monitors.

This mission represents the first module of its kind built specifically to cater to queen bees in extreme environments—a relevant challenge for futures on Earth and beyond—and contributed to an ongoing examination of relationships between biological and architectural processes of metabolism.