On October 18, 1963, a stray cat named Félicette became the first and only cat that was launched into space.  She was sent into space aboard the French Véronique rocket, to a height of 96 miles (slightly higher in kilometers) and then safely parachuted back to the earth.

 

French scientists implanted electrodes in Félicette’s brain, so during her 13 minute flight they could monitor the effects that space travel had on mammals.  You know, I’m just sayin’, but they already knew.  The first mammal in space was a monkey named Albert II that the US sent up on June 14, 1949.  And by space, we mean just barely.  He went up 83 miles, just past the Kármán Line, and then he came back down, never achieving orbit.  Unfortunately, Albert II died of de-acceleration trauma when the parachute failed to open, which is the same thing that happened to Albert I, only he didn’t make it to the Kármán Line.

 

And then there was Laika, who went from being a stray dog to becoming the first animal to orbit the earth aboard Sputnik 2, which was launched on November 3, 1957.  She only made it four times around the earth before the craft overheated.  The Russians had planned on her living much longer than that, at least six days.  That’s when her oxygen was supposed to run out.  The thing is, Laika was never meant to survive, mostly because Russia had yet to develop the technology to re-enter the atmosphere. 

 

The Russians, and the US, sent animals into space to make sure it was safe before they sent up real people.  And we learned a lot, which the French also knew before sending up Félicette.  Unlike Laika or either Albert, Félicette was safely recovered, only to be euthanized two months later so they could study her brain.  In 2019 a bronze statue honouring Félicette was placed in front of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France.

 

And, if you’re wondering...  The Kármán Line is the internationally recognized “space” boundary, sitting at 100 kilometers (62 miles) straight up.  It’s named after a guy named Theodore von Kármán, as if that comes as a surprise.  It marks the point, more or less, where the earth’s atmosphere becomes too thin for a conventional aircraft to stay aloft.  It’s where lift won’t work anymore, so you need rockets to travel fast enough not to fall back down.  In reality, the number is arbitrary,  Kármán calculated that the actual “boundary” was closer to around 84 kilometers, but the International Space Federation rounded it up to 100 because they liked even numbers.  The real purpose of the Kármán Line is for regulatory purposes, differentiating between aircraft and spacecraft, which have to follow different laws.

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