An animal shrugged off the vacuum of space and came back to lay eggs
Tardigrades survived a European Space Agency experiment that should have killed anything alive — the trick is that, for a while, they weren't.
In 2007, the European Space Agency sent dehydrated tardigrades into low Earth orbit aboard a Russian FOTON-M3 capsule and exposed them, unprotected, to the vacuum of space. Ten days later the samples came home, were rehydrated, and simply got up and walked around. Some laid eggs that hatched normally.
The survival trick has a name: cryptobiosis. Facing extreme drying, a tardigrade pulls nearly all the water out of its own cells, curls into a dormant ball called a tun, and effectively suspends its metabolism to something close to zero. There's very little left in that state for vacuum, or cold, or the absence of pressure to damage. It isn't that the animal tolerates space. It's that, for the duration, there's barely an animal there to hurt.
Unfiltered solar radiation was a different story — most of the same tardigrades died when exposed to it directly, a reminder that "nearly indestructible" has real edges. Vacuum alone, though, they walked away from unbothered, matching the survival rate of tardigrades that never left the lab.
Surviving the void, it turns out, wasn't about being tough. It was about knowing when to leave.