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It is perhaps fitting that a NASA satellite to carry yeast into orbit has roughly the shape and dimensions of a bread box.

The tiny 10-pound satellite known as PharmaSat will be hitching a ride aboard an Air Force Minotaur 1 rocket next to the main payload, a military reconnaissance satellite. Liftoff is scheduled for Thursday from a launching pad at Wallops Island in Virginia, after being postponed by weather Tuesday.

At first, the yeast cells will be comfortable space tourists inside PharmaSat’s microlaboratory, orbiting the Earth at a speed of 17,000 miles per hour and a height of 285 miles.

But then an antifungal drug will be injected into some of the yeast compartments, and instruments will measure how the yeast respond. Previous experiments on the space shuttle and the International Space Station indicate that some organisms become hardier and more virulent in outer space and more resistant to drugs.

“We’re seeing if we can quantify the effect,” said Elwood Agasid, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., which developed the satellite.

Weightlessness might be changing how the drug reacts within the cells, or it might be switching on and off certain genes, resulting in greater resistance. Such effects will become of more concern to astronauts on longer-duration space flights like a mission to...
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