快猫短视频

EVERYBODY of a certain age remembers Laika. She was, after all, the most famous dog in the world. She hit the world鈥檚 headlines in June 1957 when the Soviet Union launched her into space aboard Sputnik 2. Her rapid rise to fame was followed by an equally rapid demise a few hours after launch, when her spacecraft malfunctioned.

Contrary to popular belief, Laika was not the first animal in space. Indeed, she makes her bow only on page 143 of Colin Burgess and Chris Dubbs鈥檚 chronological account of the history of animal space flight. So the obvious question is which critters were up there before Laika?

Monkeys were carried high into the atmosphere atop obsolete German V2 flying bombs in 1948; rabbits, rats and mice sent skywards in high-altitude balloons in the early 1950s; and Russian dogs Tsygan and Dezik became the first animals to survive a ride in a rocket on 22 July 1951 after their capsule returned safely to Earth from its sub-orbital flight, a full six years before Laika had her 24 hours of fame.

They all appear in Animals in Space, a relentlessly factual account of animal endeavours in near-Earth orbit. And while the writers鈥� style is strictly academic, they have left no stone unturned in their search for the surprising fact or unexpected anecdote.

In the end, the book is not defined by the famous spacefaring animals such as Laika or NASA鈥檚 chimpanzees Ham and Enos, which flew aboard Mercury in preparation for humans, but by the smaller species whose behavioural patterns show us the stark differences between Earthbound and orbital existence.

The first fish to fly in space were two mummichog minnows aboard a Spacelab flight in the 1970s. The experiment was designed to see if they became disoriented in weightless conditions. They were, of course, accustomed to moving in three dimensions in water. At first they looped wildly in orbit, swimming randomly in relation to each other and to objects outside their plastic tank. Then, as they adopted visual cues from the spacecraft around them, they began to swim with their stomachs pointing toward the wall on which their tank was placed. Even more fascinating though, was that minnows newly hatched from eggs on the same flight adapted immediately to their new conditions.

At first spiders too displayed 鈥渆rratic swimming motions鈥� during space flight. And initially their webs were small, confined to tiny spaces where they could be held firm. Then the spiders created larger, badly constructed webs until about three weeks in space when the webs looked superficially normal. However, the most interesting aspect of these webs was that the silk was far thinner than in those constructed on Earth. Either the spiders detected that the same strength of silk was unnecessary or they simply couldn鈥檛 spin it.

The chapters are peppered with such stories, but there is surprisingly little coverage of the animal rights movement, which has grown in influence over the time span covered by this volume. Only where legislation as a consequence of protests has impinged upon the space programme do the authors raise the subject. Perhaps this is to be expected in a book that is more academic tome than best-seller. Nonetheless, when you consider many animals were sent into space for the purpose of killing them on their return to study the effects of orbital flight on their bodies and neurological systems, it鈥檚 difficult to escape the feeling that the authors have tiptoed around a sensitive area. The programme and its relationship to animal rights is surely fertile material for any future popular science work on the subject.

聯Many animals were sent into space and killed on return聰

So was the sacrifice worth it? You won鈥檛 find the answer in this book, stuffed as it is with the minutiae of the events. But the history of animal space flight is long and fascinating. It deserves its place alongside the human stories of Vostok 1, Apollo 11 and Challenger.