¶The cow jumped over tortoise orbited the Moon. The story of animals in space began in 1946 when fruit flies were flown aboard a number of suborbital flights by the United States and the Soviet Union. Not all space-bound creatures had the happiest of fates, but for this accounting, we will focus on the flights, not the… endings. A rhesus macaque monkey, Albert II, was flown to an altitude of 134 km in 1949, followed by the first mouse in space in 1950. Canines became cosmic critters starting in 1951, when the Soviet Union launched dogs, either wearing pressure suits with acrylic helmets or within pressurized cabins, to altitudes of 100, 200, and 450 km. Several of the dogs ran away prior to their flights: Smelaya was located after her escape and subsequently sent into space, while Bobik successfully flew the coop and was replaced by ZIB (an acronym translating to "Substitute for Missing Bobik)", who traveled to an altitude of 100 km before returning to Earth. In 1957, Laika became the first animal to orbit the planet. The first rabbit, plucky Marfusha (“Little Martha”), was first sent to space in 1959, and her second journey occurred in 1960. The Korabl-Sputnik 2 mission in 1960 carried the first rats, called No. 12 and No. 18. This mission also included a menagerie of 40 mice, a selection of plants, and the infamous dog Strelka, whose puppy was gifted to Jacqueline Kennedy. 1961 was a big year: a chimpanzee named HAM (Holloman Aero Med), frogs, a guinea pig, and the first homo sapien, Yuri Gagarin, reached space. “Astrocat” Félicette was launched to 209 km by the French Space Agency in 1963. NASA had a series of three “Biosatellite” missions between 1966 and 1969. Two flights carried firsts with leopard frog eggs, Bracon wasps, vinegar gnats, flour beetles, a variety of plants including wheat seedlings, Chaos carolinensis amoeba, fungi, and lysogenic bacteria. (Granted, microbes would have inadvertently been present on & in human spacecraft since the initial suborbital flights.) The first-ever tortoises (specifically of the Russian steppe variety) were sent into space in 1968 for the Soviet Union's Zond 5 mission, becoming the first inhabitants of Earth to complete a circumlunar flight, accompanied by fruit flies, mealworms, various plants, seeds, green algae, and bacteria. In 1970, bullfrogs first went to space. Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey were five mice that orbited the Moon during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The 1970s and 1980s included flights of the first fish, quail eggs, newts, ants, stick insect eggs, earthworms, chicken embryos, spiders (although we imagine a few may have stowed away earlier), as well as other plants and seeds. 3,400 honeybees took a ride on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1984 (quickly figuring out how to build honeycomb in microgravity). Approximately 2,500 jellyfish polyps were taken aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1991 (educational video featuring ‘Ari,’ an animated jellyfish), and after a duration of 9 days, 60,000 jellyfish were brought back to Earth (as far as we know, this is not yet the beginning of a horror film). In Bigelow’s Genesis I inflatable habitat, launched in 2006, there were four Madagascar hissing cockroaches and 20 Mexican jumping beans, which contain the live larvae of the moth Cydia saltitans. The Genesis II mission transported additional Madagascar hissing cockroaches, South African flat rock scorpions, and a colony of ants. In recent years, other species that have been sent to space include crickets, snails, sea urchins, spongy moth eggs, brine shrimp, silkworms, nematodes, tardigrades (which crashed into the Moon), butterflies and their larvae, roundworms, extremophiles, geckos, and Hawaiian bobtail squid. In 2009, a bat clung to the Space Shuttle Discovery during its launch; although it is unlikely to have reached orbit, we like to think that it became the first batronaut. No whales or dolphins yet, though (that we know of). |
