Space-flown basil and tomato seeds

Back in 2014, I bought some seeds that had been into space. They are cinnamon basil (Ocimum basilicum Cinnamon), still sealed into their space packet. 

According to the description:

“These seeds were flown to space on mission STS-121 aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery and attached to the exterior of the International Space Station on July 4, 2006. The seed remained attached as a component of the MISSE (Materials International Space Station Experiment) and returned to Earth on mission STS-118 aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on August 21, 2007.”

There’s a lot of information there to unpack. The first question I asked was whether it could be right that they launched on STS-121 but came back to Earth on STS-118. Weren’t the shuttle missions numbered sequentially? I looked it up, and it turns out that they were, mostly. But they were numbered as they were planned, and not as they were launched, so when missions got moved around in the schedule, their numbering didn’t change. (Wikipedia has a list of all the space shuttle missions, in launch order.) In this particular case, it was the Columbia disaster that forced the changes.

“Before the accident, Columbia had been assigned to missions STS-118 and STS-121. The STS-118 mission, also an International Space Station flight, was at first reassigned to Discovery, but was later assigned to Space Shuttle Endeavour.”

STS-121 was the only shuttle to launch on Independence Day, July 4. It was the second spaceflight for astronaut Mark Kelly, twin brother of Scott Kelly. Also onboard was Piers Sellers, who was born in England. He became an American citizen in 1991 so that he would be eligible to join the NASA astronaut corps. He later became a renowned climate scientist but sadly died in