Well, it's about 'manned' spaceflight
What was the first animal to fly onboard a rocket ?
We surely know:
The US space program used monkey, as early as 1949 on modified V-2 rocket, later onboard capsules similar to the Mercury-project capsules…
The Soviets used dogs, Laïka was the first animal to orbit the Earth…
Yesterday on BBC-2 I heard that an insect ( fly ) was the first animal to fly on a V-2 rocket in 1946 ???

Someone's been watching QI

Doug

My favorite Animals in Space have got to be the Zond 5 turtles who beat Borman, Lovell and Anders to the Moon by three months. I figure they deserve their own webcomic, at least: "Radioactive Lunar Turtle Comrades" or something like that.

There were many mice flown aboard V2s from White Sands in the late 1940s - there are even in-flight cine films of them floating free in their container (often just a strangely shaped metal box sized to fit into the payload section wherever some free space was to be found). Few of the early mice flights saw the animals return safely to earth, and doubtless they'd have been killed at once and dissected if they did survive, so no luck Mickey! Other flights of small monkeys were attempted, and these also often ended in death for the hapless animals - sometimes simply due to suffocation. Fruit flies were also regularly flown on a whole range of rockets and balloons (mostly seeking radiation damage data). Many V2s were recovered more-or-less intact (though flattened) by the simple expedient of blowing off their nose-cones in flight, which made them tumble to the ground rather than going straight in, and biological experiments and film were regularly recovered this way - parachutes etc just didn't work very well.

The Soviets tended to use dogs on their V2-derived geophysical rocket flights, some of which appear to have survived, though there's not a lot of documentation other than those famous posed shots of the dogs and the research payload, with the happy dogs posed in their cute little rocket hatch.

Perhaps the strangest animal story relates to Columbia. Months and months after it was destroyed, a lump of debris was found. This was the still-sealed package which had contained lots of little live worms, presumably in the SpaceHab module. The worms survived the breakup of Columbia and the impact with the ground, but by the time they were discovered all the original worms had died - of old age! The thousands of remaining worms were their descendants, and were still healthy and living productive wormy lives. This may qualify as the first 'generation' spaceship!

As for the first animals launched into space... ...it has to have been flies. And not in the 1940s, but the 1930s. Peenemunde was forested, and would have been full of little flies, some of which must have found their way to the V2s (and even their predecessors!), drawn by the taste of alcohol on the breeze. I'm sure that some flies found their way into space that way, though of course it'd be difficult to prove.

Bob Shaw

Colin Burgess is writing a book on " Animals in space " which will be published next year on the 50th anniversary of Laika's flight...
Looks like it were a bunch of Fruit flies which were the first 'animals' to fly onboard a launch vehicle
...

And while it doesn't fall into the category of "firsts," there was always the Florida mosquito that hitched a ride on the Apollo portion of ASTP...

-the other Doug

oDoug:

And I'm sure there were some Peenemunde beasties too! Perhaps the ASTP bug is the first documented stowaway in space...

Bob Shaw

Here is a list of non-human astronauts and cosmonauts up to 1998:

http://planet4589.org/space/book/astronaut...ronaut/bio.html

In Roads To Space, there's a story about one of the test rockets that landed off course in Siberia, during the winter. The scientists rushed to the scene and found the dogs alive and well. But the mice were frozen stiff, "like cold pelmenis". (Russian meat dumplings).

And of course, note my icon, the ill-fated dog Laika.

Click to view attachment

You've proably read the recent reports by a Russian scientist saying that she probably didn't live more than a few hours in space, due to overheating.

Oh, here are the Zond tortoises:

Click to view attachment

What cute little guys! Why didn't the Soviets have sense enough to publicize them like crazy (and thereby steal a little of Borman, Lovell and Anders' limelight)?

"...the Florida mosquito that hitched a ride on the Apollo portion of ASTP..."

Which mysteriously disappeared early in the flight.....

One thing for sure... Zero-G will never be properly colonizable before somebody invents the ZERO-G CATBOX!

Perhaps the strangest animal story relates to Columbia. Months and months after it was destroyed, a lump of debris was found. This was the still-sealed package which had contained lots of little live worms, presumably in the SpaceHab module. The worms survived the breakup of Columbia and the impact with the ground, but by the time they were discovered all the original worms had died - of old age! The thousands of remaining worms were their descendants, and were still healthy and living productive wormy lives. This may qualify as the first 'generation' spaceship!

Basicaly it's what we are worying about when we send landers on other planets. Interesting.

The best story for me is about the spiders that went aboard Skylab back in 1973-74. It was a student's idea (a girl a bit older than Sofi, IIRW) that get the idea to learn how spiders build their web in zero G. I wonder if I can find a picture on the web but it worth a try. The less we can say is that spiders get VERY confused. I hope THE web will not go this way when brought to zero G

Here's Arabella's (Skylab) web:


and Owen Garriott with camera in front of the Web Formation Experiment:

Now we know what happened to the fourth ASTP crewmember!

The fifth got 'im!

Bob Shaw

The spiders actually got more attention from the general public than any other aspect of the Skylab mission. It was an undeniably neat experiment, and I was surprised when -- after getting predictably mixed up during their first attempt at web-spinning -- the spiders quickly learned how to handle themselves in 0-g and began spinning neat, classic orb webs again. (It looked for a while as though one of them -- Arabella, I believe -- would survive long enough to come back with the first crew, but she died shortly before the return.)

Here is another photo of the Zond 5 tortoises, with a group shot of
whom I presume are the mission scientists.

Click to view attachment

Gee -- from a certified arachnophobe, I really have to thank y'all for plastering a HUGE picture of a spider into my favorite diversion...

Actually, one of the things that has always attracted me to the concept of living in space has been the idea of a place to live that is guaranteed free of spiders, mosquitoes, bees, hornets and wasps. Much less ants and fruit flies.

-the other Doug

The Zond turtles are better with the volume turned up:

Bob Shaw

That is frikkin hysterical. I laughed out loud.

I don't know about a zero-G catbox, but recall the video of the zero-G cat on the NASA vomit comet. Unless the cat was declawed, I pity the poor person who had to grab the cat after it spun and bounced around weightless.

That footage I haven't seen, but the VC is no place for a poor kitty. If a cat's taken to orbit via rocket, the cat probably should be mildly sedated, in an all-sides-padded cozy box, and be allowed to exit the box voluntarily on it's own good time once in orbit.

That is one unhappy cat.

Ugh...and imagine the endless de-furring of the air filters.

Andy

The only cat in outer space so far went up on a French suborbital rocket back in 1963 to over 160 km altitude and came back in fine shape. He even ended up on a postage stamp, which is a nice career move for someone who got plucked at random out of a Paris animal shelter.

The poor cat wasn't having a good time, but who would if some idiot throws you against a wall like that? I think that if a cat was given the opportunity to *carefully* try weightlessness (with more-or-less sensible people who wouldn't hurl it around!) then it'd like it just fine. What you need is something that the beast would like to chase (preferably not another animal - half chewed mouse in the VC sounds quite nasty!). My old cat was perfectly at home being driven about in my car (he was lazy, and never learned to drive), though some do get rather car-sick...

Bob Shaw

Here is an article on Felix, along with several postage stamps depicting the
famous space kitty:

http://www.purr-n-fur.org.uk/famous/felix.html

http://www.purr-n-fur.org.uk/philately/arc...niger-space.jpg

I also found this image of another as yet unidentified space cat:

http://home.earthlink.net/~nedcat/NED_THE_...ED_IN_SPACE.JPG

Oh my goodness, comrades - let us not forget Boris, the space monkey
on the ill-fated Luna 15 mission:

http://www.astronautix.com/astros/bormp504.htm

Waiting for Bob Shaw to somehow turn the Zond 5 tortoise image
into something relevant for this topic.

A healthy, high-protein diet makes for a happy monkey!

Bob Shaw

This Soviet children's book from 1964 has photos of the dogs sent up on
those early Sputniks.

Baranova, M.P. and Veltistov, Y. Illustrated by Y. Migunov and K. Rotov. Rags, Borya and the Rocket; a tale of home-less dogs and how they became famous

(English trans of Russian book: Tiapa, Borka i Paketa : povest o brodiachikh sobakakn, kotorye stali znamenitymi).

http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~jsisson/ragsbor.htm