What happened to the animal astronauts?
These creatures boldly went where few humans have gone before
Several creatures blasted off into space to further our understanding of exploration
Muttnik orbitsEarth Perished
In the mid-20th century, the USSR launched dozens of hardy stray dogs above Earth’s atmosphere to test whether humans could handle the rigours of space. The most famous of these is Laika – the first living creature to go into orbit. Captured wandering the streets of Moscow, Laika – which means ‘Barker’ in Russian – was strapped into a tiny space dog safety module and launched aboard Sputnik 2. Though Soviet scientists never intended Laika to return to Earth alive, at the time they suggested she had survived in space for between four days and a week before dying peacefully. It was later revealed in 2002 that her demise had been rather more harrowing. Laika had died from overheating and panic no more than seven hours after the mission began because a fan had failed. Her capsule orbited Earth 2,570 times before burning up in the atmosphere five months after blast off. In August 1960 a canine pair named Belka, or ‘Squirrel’, and Strelka, or ‘Little Arrow’ – joined by a rabbit, 42 mice and two rats – were strapped into Sputnik 5. These animals came to a less grisly end, launching into space and safely returning unharmed. Eight months later cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin famously followed in their pawsteps. Strelka went on to have six puppies, one of which – named Pushinka, or ‘Fluffy’ – was given to US president John F. Kennedy in 1961 by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Pushinka had four puppies with one of Kennedy’s dogs, which the president affectionately referred to as pupniks.
Enos’ agonising spaceflight Survived
Enos was not the first primate in space – that accolade went to Ham earlier in 1961. He was not even the first hominid to orbit the Earth, also pipped to that distinction in 1961 by cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov. His spaceflight was simply intended to test equipment and procedures before risking a NASA astronaut. Enos’ 1,263 hours of training for the flight included ‘avoidance conditioning’, during which electric shocks were administered to the soles of his feet if he responded incorrectly to simple tasks. This training aimed to get Enos to pull one of three levers in order to pick the odd one out from three presented shapes. In space, Enos began well during his first battery of tests. However, at the start of the second, the central lever malfunctioned. As a result, Enos was subjected to 76 unwarranted shocks. During the second orbit of an intended three, the flight encountered further problems. Alongside faulty equipment causing Enos’ body temperature to rise, a stuck thruster was haemorrhaging fuel. This prompted NASA to terminate the flight early. Though an uneventful re-entry and landing, the stuck thruster caused the capsule to touch down hundreds of kilometres from where it should have. This meant Enos was stuck inside for 3 hours and 20 minutes. By the time he was extracted, Enos had broken through the protective belly panel, stripped off most of his physiological sensors and had forcibly and undoubtedly painfully removed his catheter while the balloon was still inflated. A little less than a year later, Enos died of dysentery – a sad end to an unlucky space chimp.
“A stray cat from the streets of Paris became the first and only feline sent into space”
Slow and steady wins the race
Survived
Bringing new meaning to Aesop’s fable of The Tortoise and the Hare, in the race to the Moon between the US and USSR, it was two steppe tortoises who pipped the Apollo 8 crew in being the first vertebrates to successfully journey around our lunar companion. Launching from a modified Soyuz capsule in southern Kazakhstan, the unnamed tortoises – joined by mealworms, wine flies, plants, seeds, bacteria and other life, plus a 70 kilogram mannequin containing radiation detectors in the pilot’s seat – were sent on a circumlunar trajectory, looping around the Moon but not orbiting it. During this time the Zond 5 spacecraft reached a closest distance of 1,950 kilometres (1,212 miles) from the Moon and took high-quality photographs of the Earth at a distance of 90,000 kilometres (55,920 miles). All occupants survived their trip, splashing down in the Indian Ocean on 21 September. Upon assessment back on land, Soviet scientists reported that the tortoises had lost ten per cent of their body weight but otherwise seemed to be in good health, remaining active and showing no loss of appetite. Later half-shelled space pioneers include tortoises launched aboard Soyuz 20 on 17 November 1975. These tortoises set the record for the longest time any animal has spent outside Earth’s atmosphere – 90.5 days.
The one and only space cat
Survived
A stray cat plucked from the streets of Paris became the first and only feline sent into space. The French had previously launched three rats into space and wanted to upgrade to larger mammals to study how they responded to weightlessness. To this end, researchers captured 14 cats to train for the journey into space. These would-be feline astronauts were subjected to surgery to implant electrodes in their brains, and testing which included compression chambers and centrifuges. In the end Félicette – a petite tuxedo cat – was chosen for the mission – she was not a late replacement for a male cat called Felix who had escaped, as has been widely misreported. Aboard a Véronique AGI sounding rocket launched from a base in the Sahara Desert, she flew 157 kilometres (97.5 miles) above Earth and spent several minutes in zero gravity, all while scientists monitored her progress via the electrodes implanted in her brain. Félicette survived her trip to space and her return to Earth. Sadly, after living for two to three months back on Earth, she was put down so her brain could be studied. A second and final feline was launched towards space less than two weeks later, but that rocket failed on takeoff, leading to the loss of its furry crew. Thanks to a Kickstarter campaign raising about £43,000 ($57,000), Félicette was recently commemorated when a bronze statue honouring the one and only space cat was unveiled at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France.
The last lunar venturers Four survived, one perished
Even at the time Apollo 17 was a poignant mission, concluding the Apollo program and so signalling an end to human travel to the Moon for the foreseeable future. Yet the smallest occupants on the mission offered hope that humanity would soon be venturing even further afield, to Mars.
This was because they had been implanted with radiation monitors under their scalps to study the effects of cosmic rays during long space travel.
One of the animals died during the mission for unknown reasons, but the other four remained alive, circling around the Moon a record of 75 times in 147 hours and 43 minutes with astronaut Ron Evans, while Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt were conducting the last moonwalks below. After their return to Earth the four remaining live mice were killed and dissected, and although lesions in the scalp and liver were detected they appeared to be unrelated to one another, and were not thought to be the result of cosmic rays. Furthermore, no significant damage was found to the mice’s brains, eye retinas or other organs. Though inconclusive, scientists still learned a valuable lesson from the rodent experiment – that cosmic-ray experiments in particle accelerators on Earth could be useful, as they offered similar results to much more difficult space experiments. As a result, significant progress in radiobiology has been made in recent decades towards understanding the effects of cosmic rays on humans for future Mars missions.
Weaving a web of knowledge Both perished
High-school student Judith Miles was the spark that led to the first spidernauts lifting off from Earth. She proposed an experiment to NASA called ‘Web Formation in Zero Gravity’, in which spiders would be released into a box where cameras would record their actions to assess how well they adapted to the absence of gravity. It was known that the geometrical structure of the web of an orb-weaving spider provides a good measure of the condition of its central nervous system. And it was thought that since spiders sense their own weight to judge how thick to weave their web, and use both the wind and gravity to sense when to begin construction, the lack of gravity in space would pose some serious issues for the arachnids. NASA agreed to the idea, and in 1973 two garden spiders called Anita and Arabella along with the experimental apparatus flew aboard the Skylab 3 mission. Though their initial efforts were distinctly confused, both spiders managed to spin sensible webs by the end of the mission, even though they were slightly finer than on Earth. Though they both died from dehydration during their flight, Anita and Arabella are preserved at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. More recently, in 2008 and 2011, orb-weaver spiders were selected for further web-spinning experiments aboard the International Space Station (ISS), and a red-back jumping spider named Nefertiti was sent to see if it could still hunt effectively in zero gravity. All spiders showed remarkable adaptability.
“Astrobiologists learned that life can potentially travel between planets”
A tragedy’s only survivors
Survived
The Space Shuttle Columbia had served for roughly 22 years, completing 27 missions before its 2003 flight. On this fateful last mission, launch and orbit appeared to go well. However, the spacecraft and its seven-astronaut crew were tragically lost on re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere. Caused by a hole that had been punctured in one of Columbia’s wings during takeoff 16 days earlier, the disaster ultimately ended the Space Shuttle program. The initial seven-month investigation of the Columbia disaster yielded nearly 85,000 pieces of the spacecraft, including many of the 60 science experiments, some of which involved animals. Of the fish, insects, spiders, bees and silk worms that had been aboard, only the nematode worms survived.
Hundreds of microscopic nematodes were found inside Petri dishes held in six canisters within a four-kilogram locker. It was the locker’s robustness, reinforced specifically to protect the materials inside, that saved the nematodes. Yet the worms found were not the original survivors. As nematodes have a life cycle of seven to ten days, by the time they were discovered the worms were fourth- or fifth-generation descendants of the original spacefarers. From the amazing survival of the nematodes, astrobiologists learned that life can potentially travel between planets by natural means.
Hardiest animal on Earth, and in space
Survived
If you found a tardigrade floating in space, you would assume it was alien. Less than one-millimetre long, tardigrades are short, plump and puffy creatures, with four pairs of legs that each end in claws or sucking discs, and a tubular mouth ringed by teeth-like structures called stylets. Commonly known as ‘water bears’ or ‘moss piglets’, they are found in almost every environment imaginable on Earth, and are remarkably hardy. For this reason, in 2007 three groups of tardigrades were sent into space on the European
Space Agency’s Foton-M3 mission. During their trip the first group were exposed to the vacuum of outer space, the second group vacuum plus an unhealthy dose of solar radiation and the third vacuum plus full solar radiation exposure. Staggeringly, when returned to Earth and rehydrated, the first group showed no signs of damage. The two groups exposed to solar radiation fared worse, but even in the group exposed to a full dose of solar radiation, three tardigrades were successfully reanimated, making them the first animals to survive in outer space. It is for this reason some people believe tardigrades are alive on the Moon – in April 2019, Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashlanded on the Moon carrying thousands of the tiny creatures.