Medicinal Plants in the Space Exploration Era: Opportunities and Challenges for Mitigating Spaceflight-Induced Health Hazards

Since the dawn of civilization, humanity has looked to the sky, seeking to expand knowledge beyond Earth’s boundaries. The last eight decades have witnessed remarkable progress in space exploration, paving the way for increasingly longer space journeys and the establishment of human settlements on the Moon and Mars. These achievements have been made possible by advances in multiple scientific disciplines, including the rise of space medicine, astropharmacy, astrobiology, and astrobotany, each addressing how biological and technological systems adapt to extraterrestrial environments. Nevertheless, the space environment remains profoundly inhospitable to human life, making the protection of health and the assurance of long-term sustainability a key strategic goal in space exploration programs. Within this multidisciplinary framework, the potential role of medicinal plants remains underexplored. Historically central to healthcare, medicinal plants provide a vast repertoire of bioactive compounds and molecular scaffolds, many of which have inspired modern drugs. This review explores how medicinal plants could contribute to human well-being beyond Earth—not only as sources of therapeutic agents to mitigate spaceflight-induced ailments but also as biomanufacturing platforms for on-demand production of pharmaceuticals. Ultimately, medicinal plants could continue to play a pivotal role in supporting human health, also in space, but it poses new challenges and requires further scientific and technological advances.