NASA astronaut Scott Kelly recently posted a photo of the bright orange zinnias that blossomed on board the International Space Station (ISS). But Kelly made a mistake by claiming that it was the first ever flower to grow in space.

Around four years back, astronaut Don Pettit had grown a few different sorts of plants on board ISS. That experiment was labeled as a “personal biology experiment” by the American space agency.

As there was a lack of sophisticated growth chamber at the time, Pettit had to use plastic bags as pots to grow plants. Pettit successfully grew zucchini and broccoli sprouts as well as cultivated a sunflower to blossom.

In a blog post, Pettit wrote in June 2012, “Sunflower is going to seed … His blossom is wilted-brown and has a few lopsided packed seeds. This is not quite normal, but then we are living on a frontier and things are different here.”

Thus in conveying his excitement, Kelly unintentionally made a mistake. His zinnias weren’t the first flowers to bloom in space. But that credit doesn’t goes to Pettit’s sunflower either.

In the 1990s, cosmonauts managed to grow dwarf wheat stalks through their full lifecycle, including flowering, on Russian space station Mir. Prior to that, Soviet cosmonauts used a small greenhouse to grow plants on the Salyut 6 station, but only those plants bloomed that were already budding when they were delivered to the outpost.