MG-J25

One payload among many.

MG-J25 Genesis was the first Cannabis sativa L. seed payload flown by Martian Grow. The seeds rode inside MAYASAT-1, a 1U CubeSat carrying a European-led biology payload of 980 biosamples including DNA, plants, fungi, yeast, and soil microbes.

The mission goal for Martian Grow was narrow: place the seeds in low Earth orbit, expose them to microgravity and cosmic radiation, and bring them home for analysis. Everything past that line — the genetic measurements, the cultivation, the breeding program — depended on closing this loop.

Launch, orbit, deploy.

The launch was clean. SpaceX delivered the Mission Possible capsule to a 520 km Sun-synchronous orbit on schedule. The Exploration Company confirmed successful deployment at 02:05 CEST on 24 June 2025, with the capsule reaching an apogee of 620 km.

Onboard payloads powered through the orbital phase. Re-entry was confirmed at 10:00 CEST after three orbits. Every step that depended on the launch vehicle and the orbital science platform worked as designed.

Recovery.

Per The Exploration Company's post-flight update, the Mission Possible reentry capsule had a partial recovery outcome. For Martian Grow that meant the Cannabis sativa L. seeds were not returned for analysis.

We are not assigning blame and we are not blurring the facts. The capsule did not deliver the payload back to the team. There is no Genesis dataset to publish.

Recovery is the load-bearing step.

It is easy to treat orbital exposure as the hard part of a mission. The science is in flight. The novelty is the orbit. The press happens at launch.

Genesis taught us that none of that matters if the seeds do not come home. Recovery is the program.

MG-J26 Horizon was redesigned around this lesson: a longer-duration orbital window for science, a different capsule partner, and a payload manifest engineered for partial-recovery scenarios to still produce a usable dataset.