Matt Damon, eat your heart out - China’s growing plants in space!

Seeds taken to the moon on China’s Chang’e-4 mission have begun to sprout, according to the China National Space Administration.

Images published on Twitter show cotton shoots growing in an airtight container aboard the lander, having been kept dormant during a 20-day trip from Earth to the Moon.

Admittedly the scenes are less glamorous than The Martian, where Damon’s character - a botanist by trade - improvises a farm on Mars using potatoes (intended for thanksgiving dinner), human faeces and water extracted from leftover hydrogen fuel.

But the results are ground-breaking, nonetheless. No biological matter had previously been grown on the lunar surface, while January 3 marked the first time a spacecraft landed on the far side of the Moon.

It is hoped the experiment will pave the way for long-term space exploration and provide astronauts with the means to grown their own crops, à la Damon.

According to Fred Watson of the Australian Astronomical Observatory, the development represented a step in the right direction.

“It suggests that there might not be insurmountable problems for astronauts in future trying to grow their own crows,” Mr Watson told the BBC.

“I think there’s certainly a great deal of interest in using the Moon as staging post, particularly for flights to Mars, because it’s relatively near the Earth.”

Beyond cotton and potatoes, the container - worth an estimated $1.8 million - is home to fruit fly and silk worm eggs which are hoped to hatch, before living their lives in a box on a desolate rock around 385,000 km from their mates.

In this photo provided Jan. 12, 2019, by the China National Space Administration via Xinhua News Agency, the lunar lander of the Chang'e-4 probe is seen in a photo taken by the rover Yutu-2 on Jan. 11, 2019. China's space agency says it worked with NASA to collect data from the far side of the moon. The state-run China Daily said this was the first such collaboration since an American law banned joint space projects with China that do not have prior congressional approval. (China National Space Administration/Xinhua News Agency via AP)

@starrdust let's buy seedbox in the Moon?