The Saddest and Strangest Tales of Animals in Space - Gizmodo

From spiders struggling to make webs in orbit to bats clinging to the outside of the Space Shuttle, the history of animals in space is as fascinating as it is weird.

On June 11, 1948, a rhesus monkey named Albert I become the first animal to reach space, strapped aboard a V-2 Blossom rocket that flew to a suborbital height of 83 miles (134 kilometers) above the surface.

Since then, scientists have sent a dizzying assortment of living organisms to space, including dogs, apes, reptiles, insects, plants, and various microorganisms.

The Soviet Union sent its fair share of dogs to space during the formative years of the country’s space program, including Laika—the first animal ever sent to Earth orbit.

These experiments were crude by today’s standards, as Laika, among other Soviet dogs sent to space, were literally stray mutts picked off the street.

Prior to the 1957 Laika mission, the Soviet Union conducted a number of high-altitude tests with canines.

On October 18, 1963, the French space program launched Félicette—a stray Persian cat—into space.

In February 1966, the Soviet space program launched the dogs Veterok and Ugolyok to beyond the protective Van Allen Belts, which they did to study the prolonged effects of space travel and the deleterious effects of radiation.

The dogs stayed in space for 21 days, which remains the canine record.

The 21 days in space remained a record for any animal—including humans—until the Soviet Soyuz 11 mission, in which three cosmonauts stayed aboard the Salyut 1 space station for 23 days.

Tragically, the three men died during reentry and remain the only humans to have perished in space (the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia was technically not in space when the shuttle disintegrated on February 1, 2003, resulting in their deaths).

For the Soviet Zond 5 mission, a batch of living organisms took a historic trip around the Moon and back.

No living creatures had ever ventured so far into space, and the mission ended successfully with the capsule splashing down in the Indian Ocean.

All seven crew members were killed during the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, but something did pull through this awful episode: worms

In one of the greatest feats of endurance, a batch of tardigrades managed to survive 10 days of exposure to open space

The experiment occurred in 2007 as part of the European Space Agency’s FOTON-M3 mission, and it established tardigrades, also known as water bears, as among the toughest organisms on the planet—and off

As Space Shuttle Discovery prepared to launch for the STS-119 mission in March 2009, ground controllers noticed a bat clinging to the external fuel tank