A HISTORY OF ANIMALS IN SPACE

Animals were used repeatedly in the early days of the space race. The Soviet Union sent dogs into space on multiple occasions. The first hominid in space was Ham, a chimpanzee who took a suborbital flight in 1961 as part of the US Project Mercury programme. But very few non-human animals have made it as far as the Moon. In 1968, the Soviet Zond 5 mission transported two tortoises and some fruit fly eggs on a voyage that circled the Moon and returned safely to Earth. Four years later, five mice – nicknamed Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum and Phooey, circled the Moon 72 times on the US Apollo 17 mission. As the space race progressed, animals participated less, says former chief historian at NASA, Dr Roger Launius. This is because the main purpose of using them was to establish whether spaceflight would be safe for humans. “By the time that we’re going to the Moon, we’ve learned enough to know that we can build a spacecraft that the astronauts can survive in, assuming nothing goes wrong,” he says.

Besides the tardigrades, which may have survived the Beresheet crash in 2019, there is a small possibility that silkworms hatched on the Moon in recent times. In early 2019, a Chinese lunar lander, Chang’e 4, successfully brought silkworm eggs to the lunar surface. At the time of writing, BBC Science Focus was unable to find any public information about the fate of the eggs. The China National Space Administration and researchers behind the mission did not respond to requests for comment.