COMPANY WANTS WOMEN TO HAVE BABIES… IN SPAAAAACE

SpaceLife Origin, a company based in the Netherlands, wants to send a pregnant woman into space, accompanied by a “trained, world-class medical team” to oversee an in-space delivery. The mission would last 24 to 36 hours. After the woman delivered the child, the capsule would return to the ground. Egbert Edelbroek, one of the company’s executives, says spacefaring childbirth is part of creating an insurance policy for the human species. Should a catastrophe someday render Earth unlivable, he hopes the human species will move off-world and settle elsewhere. Having babies in space now would be good practice. After the delivery is over, mom and baby would have to survive the descent back to Earth, which currently involves a bone-rattling free fall through the atmosphere, followed by a parachute landing in the Kazakh desert. Currently having nothing more than the concept of having a baby in space, SpaceLife Origin has set the year 2024 as the target date for the trip.
* In addition to a world-class medical team, you’re gonna need a world-class janitorial staff to clean up the zero-G delivery room.
* Good luck with the re-entry after all the controls are splashed with all the different stuff that comes out.
* Apologies to our listeners who are eating breakfast right now.
* We’ve learned something surprising here today. There are actually some corporate executives out there who are even more Cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs than Elon Musk.
* Has SpaceLife Origin learned nothing from sci-fi movies? Obviously, outer space radiation would make the newborn baby mutate into a killer blob of goo that would kill everyone on the ship, then return to earth and wipe out the rest of humanity.
* All this, of course, avoids the bigger question here: There’s actually somebody named Egbert?