When we think of animals sent into space, the first name that comes to mind is Laika, the dog that the Soviets launched with Sputnik 2 in November 1957. The American space program did something similar with Ham, the first chimpanzee, however there was another cosmic explorer that few talk about: the cat Félicette. Nicknamed "Astro-Cat", Félicette has no public and official recognition of her journey, but a Kickstarter campaign seeks to change that.
A Brief History of Animals in Space
The first animals sent into space were fruit flies. They traveled aboard a V-2 reassembled by the United States in 1947, and their recovery alive was successful. Albert II was the first monkey to reach space two years later, but died on impact after a parachute failure. The story continues with mice, the Soviet dogs Tsygan and Dezik in 1951 (both rescued), and of course Laika, the first to reach Earth orbit. Flies, monkeys, dogs... and what about cats? The first tests with felines force us to go back to 1947, though they were not focused on space travel, but on the effects of microgravity. To locate the first space cat, we must advance to the year 1963, and look beyond the main programs.
Félicette's Journey
Her name was Félicette, a cat picked up from the streets of Paris. She and thirteen other felines were trained by the government of France, and apparently she was chosen for the experiment (to measure the impact of space travel on brain activity) because she was the most docile, although other sources suggest that the rest of the cats gained weight too quickly. Félicette underwent surgery, received a permanent implant in her head, and on October 18, 1963 she was launched from a base in Hammaguir (Algeria). Her flight of barely thirteen minutes allowed her to reach an altitude of 157 kilometers, returning safe and sound to the laboratory. Unfortunately, Félicette was sacrificed three months later to study the electrodes in her brain in greater depth.
A Monument for Félicette
Félicette almost passed into oblivion due to a rude error with her name and sex (on more than one occasion it was said that she was a male named Felix), and there is not a single statue or plaque that remembers her as she deserves. A recent Kickstarter campaign just raised more than 40,000 pounds to turn Félicette's monument into reality, but the hardest part is finding a suitable place, preferably in Paris. The bureaucracy is brutal, and the campaign leader Matthew Serge Guy does not want the monument to end up stored in a garage for years while the paperwork is resolved. I hope they don't take too long.
