The real story
Tardigrades were first described in 1773 by a German pastor who called them 'little water bears'. When their home dries out, they push out almost all their water, pull in their legs and become a 'tun', with their metabolism slowed to almost nothing. In 2007 the European FOTON-M3 mission left dried tardigrades exposed to open space for ten days. Back on Earth, many of them were rehydrated and walked away.
They are tough but not invincible. A 2020 study found dried tardigrades die after about an hour at roughly 83 °C. In 2019 the Israeli lander Beresheet crashed on the Moon carrying thousands of them, and in 2021 scientists fired tardigrades out of a gas gun to test it. They survived up to about 900 metres per second, but the lander hit far harder, so they almost certainly didn't make it.
