Biomatter uprising reimagines the infrastructure of aerospace science through the vascular intelligence of plants and the cosmological architectures of Indigenous knowledge. In April 2025, seeds from five Indigenous communities traveled aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, embedded within MIT Space Enabled’s Green Rocket Fuel experiment. This launch unfolded as a trans-terrestrial ritual: a convergence of scientific inquiry, ecological sovereignty, and ancestral governance.

Each participating community chose seeds through processes anchored in place, lineage, and ritual obligation. The Khasis of Meghalaya, the Likanantay of the Atacama, the Changpa of Ladakh, the Maasai of the Nashulai and the Soligas of the BR Hills contributed vegetal kin that articulate relational continuities across soil and sky. These seeds exceed their function as payload; they act as storied carriers of territory, prophecy, and biocultural resilience.

This experiment creates encounter between indigenous ritual and spaceflight. The rocket often configured through extractive logics of conquest and acceleration becomes vessel of ritual relationality. It attempts an artistic critical counter-geography of ascent, where vegetal agency, community-led knowledge, and ancestral presence co-compose the terms of space engagement. Through this act, Indigenous knowledge systems extend their sovereignty into near-orbit, transforming aerospace from a site of erasure into a corridor of resurgence. One of the seeds, after its return from orbit, underwent a process of electron sputtering to create a thin metallic coating across its surface. This treatment turned the seed into a reflective object, a mirror engineered through techniques pioneered by the aerospace industry. Positioned within the project as both material remnant and conceptual tool, the seed now offers us reflexive pause, a way to look back at ourselves.