Life on Mars may be freeze-dried.

But there’s a solution: freeze-dry it.

In a first-of-its-kind experiment, a team of Japanese researchers freeze-dried samples of mice sperm and sent them aboard the ISS to see how well this crucial element of human life (and, well, a lot of life on Earth) will fair against the harsh radiation of space.

Even after six long years aboard the ISS, the team found that the mice’s space sperm sired equally healthy pups as its terrestrial control. An additional X-ray experiment predicts that this positive outcome could persist with up to 200 years of space radiation exposure.