Rest in Peace, Russian Space Sex Geckos

The five geckos that were sent to space to have sex have perished, potentially well before returning to Earth, and without mating. This sex gecko space mission, it seems, has ended in failure.

While the world waits for the Russian scientists to determine the cause of death by reviewing video footage taken of the geckos in space, The Telegraph quoted one Russian official who said that the geckos may have died shortly after arriving in space.

"We can say with confidence that they died at least a week before the landing because their bodies were partly mummified," the unnamed official told Russian media. "Hypothermia is not the main possible cause but only one of the options. Others include a possible malfunction of the on-board equipment and life-support system."

The sex gecko satellite made headlines in July when Russian officials announced that the Foton-M4 spacecraft housing the geckos was no longer responding to mission commands. Outcry spread far and wide, all the way to John Oliver as well as Motherboard's own Becky Ferreira, who noted that the Russian space program had trouble getting mice back from space alive in 2013, but that they had successfully recovered geckos from that mission, only for the geckos to be euthanized. Also potentially lost were fruit flies, silkworm eggs and mushrooms.

Things looked grim for the sex geckos indeed, but then, it's always darkest before the dawn. Even as we grimly consoled ourselves that at least the geckos had each other, in late July, Roscomos announced to an elated, if sarcastic world, that it had re-established contact with the satellite and the mission was going forward.

Sometime between then and now—or maybe even before—something went wrong, and the five geckos took their place on the steadily growing list of animals that have died in space.

Although it seems like, dating back to Laika the Soviet dog whose heart failed while she was becoming the first animal to orbit the Earth, that animals rarely make it back to Earth alive, the majority do. Fruit flies were the first animals launched into space and they survived that historic 1947 mission, as did the fruit flies that shared the satellite with the sex geckos.

"After removing all the biological objects from the landing apparatus for initial research it was established that the fruit flies had survived the space flight very well and had developed and multiplied," the Russian Federal Space Agency said in a statement.

Maybe it was a fruit fly sex mission all along, in which case it was a rollicking success. But you didn't need to mummify any geckos to figure out that fruit flies are really capable reproducers. You could've just looked in my kitchen.