The role and mechanisms of the space environ-ment with regard to microorganisms is a cut-ting-edge issue. China has recently launched the ShenZhou VIII spacecraft that carried 15 species of microorganism to test the response of micro -organisms following exposure to the space envi -ronment. This revealed that effects were mainly seen in changes to bacterial invasion, antibiotic resistance and environmental adaptation. The mechanisms could be due to multiple changes in the genome, transcriptome, proteome and metabolome, and can be used to explain effects at molecular, cellular, tissue, organ and whole organism levels. Based on these findings, we have proposed the direction of the space microbiology development.With increasingly frequent space exploration, space has become a new field of human activ-ity. Microorganisms are natural constituents of our current environment, existing in air, water, soil and biotic systems. Therefore, human space activities inevitably transport some microorgan -isms to space. Although outer space is an extreme and very complex environment, microorganisms readily adapt to changes in environmental vari -ables, such as weightlessness, cosmic radiation, temperature, pressure and nutrient levels, and exhibit a variety of morphological and physi-ological changes. Various microbial changes can happen in space, which could either be use -ful or harmful. Microorganisms often possess characteristics such as being small, fast growing and adaptable and so are extremely suitable for space study, and have an important role in the development of space biology. Currently, world -wide research relevant to the space biomedical field is still in its infancy. The effects of the space environment on microorganisms and the mecha -nisms by which they occur are cutting-edge issues that urgently require our attention.Owing to the limitations of space-flight time, specific environmental conditions and other uncontrollable factors, implementation of spaceship-based experimental research is more difficult. To overcome these weaknesses, terrestrial laboratory facilities are designed to simulate parameters of outer space, such as rotary cell culture system, parabolic flight simulation and diamagnetic levitation. However, since a ground-based simulation environment is artificial, many different results will be generated due to the various types of machine models, parameters and operators used in the simulation. Hence, a unified standard is beyond current space research. Researchers have recognized that the ground-based simulation of conditions such as microgravity and ionizing radiation only imitates the real space environment in a limited manner for the microbes being analyzed