Animals in space

• 1. Introduction

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  Animals in space began not with a dog or a chimpanzee but with fruit flies. A captured German V-2 rocket carried them from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on the 20th of February 1947. The rocket climbed to 109 km in just over three minutes. The purpose was to understand what radiation does to living tissue at the edge of space. The Blossom capsule deployed its parachute and the flies were recovered alive. Their survival opened a question that no laboratory on Earth could answer: what does spaceflight itself do to a living body? That question would pull seven nations into an effort spanning decades. The passengers ranged from dogs and primates to creatures no one in 1947 could have imagined sending beyond the atmosphere. Some came home to press conferences and scientific papers. Some came home to autopsies. Who flew, why they were chosen, and what happened to them is one of the stranger stories of the 20th century.

• 2. Laika and the Space Dogs

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  Tsygan and Dezik rode a Soviet R-1 IIIA-1 rocket into space on the 22nd of July 1951 and both came back alive. They were the first living higher organisms to survive spaceflight. Dezik would die on a later flight; Tsygan survived. The Soviet program kept records of at least 57 passenger slots for dogs across the following two decades.

  On the 3rd of November 1957, Laika launched aboard Sputnik 2, the second spacecraft ever to orbit Earth. She was the first animal to reach orbit. In the West, the satellite was nicknamed Muttnik. Engineers had not yet figured out how to return a spacecraft from orbit; Laika's death was expected before she ever lifted off.

  On the 19th of August 1960, Sputnik 5 carried dogs Belka and Strelka into orbit. Their companions included a gray rabbit, 40 mice, 2 rats, and 15 flasks of fruit flies and plants. All returned alive. One of Strelka's puppies, born after her mission, was named Pushinka. Nikita Khrushchev gave Pushinka to Caroline Kennedy in 1961. Many of Pushinka's descendants are known to exist today.

  Veterok and Ugolyok launched aboard Cosmos 110 on the 22nd of February 1966, spending 22 days in orbit before landing on the 16th of March. That record for the longest spaceflight by dogs has never been surpassed.

• 3. Monkeys and Chimpanzees

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  On the 14th of June 1949, a rhesus monkey named Albert II rode a V-2 rocket to about 134 km and became the first primate and first mammal in space. A parachute failure killed him on impact. The monkey before him, Albert I, had not even cleared the boundary of space on his flight.

  Roughly two-thirds of the monkeys launched during the 1940s and 1950s never came home. Gordo, a squirrel monkey trained by the U.S. Navy, flew on the 13th of December 1958 from Cape Canaveral. He survived 10 g of launch, 8 minutes of weightlessness, and 40 g of reentry at 16,000 km/h. The nose cone sank 1,302 nautical miles downrange from Cape Canaveral and was never found.

  The turn came on the 28th of May 1959. Able was a 3 kg rhesus monkey from Independence, Kansas. Baker was a 310 g squirrel monkey from Peru. Together they flew to 579 km altitude aboard Jupiter IRBM AM-18, covering 2,735 km down the Atlantic Missile Range. They withstood forces 38 times the normal pull of gravity. Both survived, the first monkeys to do so. Able died four days later during surgery to remove an infected electrode, killed by the anesthesia. Baker lived until the 29th of November 1984 at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

  Ham the chimpanzee flew on the 31st of January 1961 on Mercury-Redstone 2. He had been trained to pull levers for banana pellets and to avoid electric shocks. His mission showed that complex tasks could be performed during spaceflight. Enos completed the first orbital chimpanzee flight on the 29th of November 1961, circling Earth twice aboard Mercury-Atlas 5. Two months later, Project Mercury pilot John Glenn flew the same route.

• 4. Circling the Moon

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  On the 14th of September 1968, the Soviet Zond 5 spacecraft left Earth carrying two Horsfield's tortoises on a path around the Moon. Their companions included wine flies, meal worms, and other biological specimens. No living creature had ever traveled that far from Earth. The capsule overshot its planned landing site but was recovered at sea on the 21st of September. The tortoises had survived, though both had lost weight.

  Turtles followed on Zond 6 in November 1968, just before the crewed American Apollo 8 mission circled the Moon in December. Four more turtles flew on Zond 7, rounding the Moon on the 11th of August 1969. That mission took place three weeks after Apollo 11's crew had walked on the surface.

  Apollo 17, launched on the 7th of December 1972, carried five pocket mice in its command module. The mice were named Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey. Astronaut Ronald Evans remained with them in the America command module while his crewmates descended to the surface. Over six days, the mice circled the Moon a record 75 times. One of the five did not survive the journey.

• 5. A Wider Cast of Nations

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  France flew a rat named Hector into space on the 22nd of February 1961, its first such mission. Two more French rats followed in October 1962. Then, on the 18th of October 1963, France launched Félicette, a cat, aboard the Veronique AGI sounding rocket No. 47. The launch was directed by the French Centre d'Enseignement et de Recherches de Médecine Aéronautique. Félicette had electrodes implanted in her brain; those signals were transmitted back to Earth during her 15-minute flight. She was recovered alive by parachute. After two months of scientific analysis, she was euthanized so an autopsy could be performed. On the 18th of December 2019, a bronze statue of Félicette was unveiled at the Université internationale de l'espace in Strasbourg.

  Argentina launched a rat named Belisario on the 11th of April 1967, atop a Yarará rocket from a military range in Cordoba. The animal was recovered successfully. Argentina later sent a cai monkey named Juan on the 23rd of December 1969, in an operation called Operación Navidad, or Operation Christmas. Juan ascended 82 km aboard a Canopus II rocket before being safely recovered. A second female monkey of the same species flew on the 1st of February 1970. She reached a higher altitude than Juan but was lost when her capsule's parachute failed.

  China launched mice and rats in 1964 and 1965, then two dogs in 1966. Japan sent its first animals into space on the 18th of March 1995, a species of newt aboard the Space Flyer Unit. Iran became the seventh and most recent nation to launch animals into space. On the 3rd of February 2013, the Kavoshgar 3 rocket carried a mouse, two turtles, and worms beyond Earth and returned them all alive.

• 6. Living Laboratories

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  Bion 7, launched by the Soviet Union in 1985, carried 10 newts of the species Pleurodeles waltl. Researchers removed part of each newt's front limbs before launch. In orbit, they studied how quickly the tissue would regenerate in microgravity, knowledge they hoped would apply to human recovery from space injuries.

  During the European Space Agency's FOTON-M3 mission in September 2007, tardigrades survived 10 days of direct exposure to open space. These microscopic creatures, also known as water-bears, had no protection beyond their own biology. On the same mission, a cockroach named Nadezhda conceived during the flight and produced 33 offspring after returning to Earth.

  In 1994, four Japanese rice fish aboard STS-65 mated, laid eggs, and hatched healthy young while in orbit. They were the first animals known to conceive and produce offspring in space. Skylab 3, launched in 1973, introduced the first fish in space and the first spiders in orbit. Two garden spiders named Arabella and Anita were among the passengers; researchers studied how they built webs in microgravity. Tortoises aboard Soyuz 20, launched on the 17th of November 1975, set the duration record for any animal in space. They spent 90.5 days in orbit.

  On the 3rd of June 2021, SpaceX CRS-22 delivered tardigrades and Hawaiian bobtail squid to the International Space Station. The squid arrived as hatchlings. Researchers studied whether they could incorporate their symbiotic bacteria into their light organs under the conditions of orbit.