Getting a biomedical experiment into orbit takes years, but there's nothing like watching your organisms head for the stars. “I teared up at the launch,” says Mary Bouxsein, a bone biomechanics researcher at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston who led one of the research projects sent into space last month. “You are quite excited for the launch, and then you take a step back and say, 'We put mice into orbit.'” Here we describe some of the health-related studies that hitched a ride to the International Space Station and back last month aboard Shuttle Atlantis.

Boning up, up and away: US and Belgian researchers, in partnership with the California biotech Amgen, launched 30 mice into orbit, half of which were injected with a sclerotin-targeted antibody designed to boost bone formation.

All sys-stems are go: California scientists sent mouse embryonic stem cells in culture to study the effects of space flight on cell differentiation.

Filming in space: A team from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York grew Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus in flight to see how biofilms form in microgravity.

Flu shot at the sun: Researchers from Arizona State University in Tempe dispatched a Salmonella-based vaccine against pneumococcal pneumonia that they plan to test in mice back on Earth.