The space shuttle Atlantis lifts off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida—marking BioServe’s first launch into orbit. (Photo: NASA)

BioServe founder Marvin Luttges in 1989. (Photo: BioServe)

Adeline Loesch assembles space “petri dishes” containing biological organisms in a lab on the CU Boulder campus. (Photo: Adeline Loesch)

BioServe marks 100th orbital launch

In April 1991, Louis Stodieck watched as the space shuttle Atlantis blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

At the time, Stodieck was associate director of BioServe Space Technologies, a research center at CU Boulder. He had helped to design a set of test tubes that would, among other things, not spill the moment they reached space.

BioServe, which was founded in 1987, works with scientists at companies and research institutions around the world to conduct life science experiments in space. Atlantis’ launch in 1991 marked the first time the center had sent scientific equipment into orbit 
around Earth.

“I never get tired of launches,” said Stodieck, who served as BioServe’s director from 1999 to 2019 and is now its chief scientist. “The sound reaches you seconds after the launch because you’re a few miles away. When it hits you, it’s this low vibration, and you just feel it.”

This year, BioServe celebrated another milestone—its 100th orbital launch.

On April 21, 2025, a SpaceX Dragon capsule flew to the International Space Station (ISS) carrying equipment belonging to three research projects, or “payloads,” developed by BioServe. They included several colonies containing billions of bacteria and algae.

“This launch is an amazing milestone,” said Stefanie Countryman, the current director of BioServe. “It exemplifies the hard work of everybody at BioServe, not just our engineers and researchers, but also our students.”

BioServe began as a five-year grant from NASA under founder Marvin Luttges, a professor of aerospace engineering sciences at CU Boulder. Researchers at the center have since sent a wide range of living things into orbit. They include single-celled organisms but also ants, silkworms, mice and an intrepid “spidernaut” named Nefertiti.

Today, astronauts on the ISS can also peer through a microscope flight certified and launched by BioServe and grow cell cultures in four incubators called Space Automated Bioproduct Lab (SABL) 1, 2, 3 and 4. BioServe even supplied the refrigerator where humans on the ISS store their food. On the ground, the center runs a mission operation and control center at CU Boulder. There, BioServe staff talk to astronauts in real time on a giant screen.

“We’re replicating the sorts of biological labs that you can find at CU Boulder in space,” said Tobias Niederwieser, a research associate at BioServe.

Over the years, researchers at the center have also kept one foot firmly planted on Earth—generating new insights into a range of human medical conditions.

More than two decades ago, for example, Stodieck and his colleagues designed a specialized habitat for mice to live on the ISS. His team’s research revealed new clues to why mammals lose bone mass when they leave Earth. Those insights, in turn, helped inspire new kinds of medications for osteoporosis in people.

Niederwieser and his colleagues have kicked off an effort to grow human hematopoietic stem cells in space. Doctors often transplant these cells into people to treat cancers like leukemia and lymphoma.

In a few early experiments, the group discovered that stem cells may grow more freely in space than they do on Earth. That could lead to a new vision for space—one in which stations in orbit around Earth produce various treatments for human illnesses, then send them back to patients on the ground.

“Humans have been on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years and have evolved with only one gravity,” Stodieck said. “It’s really been a privilege to understand how organisms work in another environment.”