On 5 December 2018 at 19:16 CET, ISU’s Hydra-1 experiment was launched from Florida onboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for delivery to the International Space Station (ISS). Hydra-1 is a plant synthetic biology experiment. It brings together personnel at ISU, the Universities of California, Berkeley and Utah, CNRS-Strasbourg and the NASA Ames Research Centre. Hydra-1 features two main parts, a plant-growth chamber and a control unit. Seeds travel to space inside the plant-growth chamber. Once on orbit, Hydra-1 will be installed in the Space Applications Services (SAS) ICE-Cubes Facility (ICF) in the European Space Agency (ESA) Columbus module where it will join two other ISU Hydra payloads launched last June.