The first spacecraft to transport biological material was Sputnik 2. It was the second spacecraft put into orbit around the Earth on November 3, 1957 that, in a sealed cabin, housed the dog Laika, whose original name was “Kudryavka “.
The stray dog had enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame in 1957, having been discovered on a Moscow street, trained – in a hurry – and thrown into space. The mission ended with Laika’s death five hours after launch.
Despite this disastrous mission, the launch of Sputnik 2 – more than 60 years ago – was a defining moment in the history of space exploration for the mere fact of being the first time that a living creature had been aboard a spaceship. .
While Laika may have been a pioneer animal in Earth’s orbit, animals had been used in the name of space exploration for more than a decade.
Russian and American scientists used animals for a long time to test the limits of their capacity, in order to send living organisms into space and return them unharmed.
The first ones sent into outer space were … fruit flies, which flew at a height of about 100 kilometers inside a Nazi rocket, the V2 in 1947. This V2 rocket harbored a group of fruit flies or fruit flies that we very much doubt that they had proper names like Laika’s case. It was launched into space and also some seeds. The objective was to know the effects of this type of travel, altitude, acceleration, and especially radiation … in these insects because they respond to many of the substances included in drugs for humans and, thanks to their speed of Reproduction it is easy to see how different generations respond to the experiments performed.
In the following years, NASA sent several monkeys, named Alberto I, II, III, IV, into space, along with the monitoring instruments. They all died.
It was not until the flight of a monkey named Yorick (accompanied by 11 mice) in September 1951 that scientists were able to claim that they had sent a primate into space and returned it alive to Earth.
After the success of that flight, the experiments became more elaborate. Today we remember the history of all those animals that traveled into space.
