British startup Mass Balance has launched an autonomous, self-run chemical laboratory into orbit, aiming to gather data on hard-to-study, disease-causing proteins in the near-absence of gravity. The grapefruit-sized apparatus lifted off aboard a SpaceX transporter on Tuesday morning and matters because it represents an early step towards using space as a routine research environment for life sciences and pharmaceutical work that is difficult to conduct on Earth.

The pod, housed in a 10cm (4in) casing built by Austrian firm Tumbleweed, will orbit for a couple of months, automatically measuring how live cells behave under weak gravity and beaming the data back. Removing gravity avoids effects such as convection and sedimentation that muddy results on Earth. The company hopes to study disordered proteins linked to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and some cancers, and to use the data to train an AI model, generating revenue through model, data licensing and access. This mission is chiefly a test of the operating system and data capture, using an industrial biocatalyst to break down a compound. Rival firms BioOrbit and Varda Space Industries are pursuing similar orbital labs, though, unlike them, Mass Balance does not plan to return its system to Earth.