![]() ![]() Whatever her origins, on the prescribed date of 18 October 1963 the cat was blasted off in a special capsule on top of a French Véronique AG1 rocket, from the Colomb Bacar rocket base at Hammaguir in the Algerian Sahara desert. It seems likely she is the cat on left of the group photo shown above. The cat selected to undertake the first mission one report said because she was the only animal that hadn't put on too much weight! was a nice-natured black-and-white female, apparently formerly a Paris street cat, although it was suggested she'd been bought by the French government from a dealer. ![]() The photo ( right) shows some of the French felines in training. An exception to the 'no name' rule was Scoubidou her implanted electrode deteriorated from polarisation and was removed, so she became the laboratory mascot and was later adopted by one of the secretaries. Although they were deliberately not given names, to discourage staff from becoming too attached to them and results possibly being influenced, every effort was made to keep them comfortable and in a calm environment they don't seem to have suffered too much, as ten of the would-be astronauts were later 'decommissioned'. During 19 white rats were also used in space experiments by the French three, named Hector, Castor and Pollux by journalists, were launched at different times, with varying degrees of success.īy 1963 the French government had moved on from rodents and had some 14 cats undergoing intensive training for possible space flight, with fairly arduous tasks involving a compression chamber and a centrifuge. The first primate actually to enter orbit in space was Enos, a chimpanzee launched on 29 November 1961 and successfully recovered a few days later. Other animals mice and various monkeys had been used in previous sub-orbital space experiments by the USA, from as early as 1949. Following the protests, the rocket project 360 BD was dismantled and the man responsible for the project, Colonel Manuel dos Santos Lage, was transferred to other duties. Note: Brazilian reader Erika Flore, to whom thanks, later informed us that in fact Flamengo never went into space. Therefore we remain a bit sceptical about the information, but if the flight did take place, hopefully it was successful, as the poor cat was the pet of the project manager’s daughters. ![]() It seems odd that there was no follow-up, and the news doesn't seem to have reached the international press. The cat, a tomcat called Flamengo, was said to be trained up and ready to go there was even a photo of him in his chamber but we haven't been able to find out whether the flight actually happened or what the result was. Protests were made by US cat lovers, but in December 1958 it was reported that the flight was to go ahead on New Year's Day 1959. The rocket confusingly named 'Felix I' was to be built by the Army Technical School, and the plan was that the feline, in a pressurised chamber and with recording instruments attached, would be fed oxygen during the flight and then parachuted down from the rocket's zenith, which was to be at about 70 miles high (112 km). We came across announcements from late in 1958 in some local American newspapers ( Daytona Morning Journal, Spokane Daily Chronicle were two) saying that the Brazilian Army was planning to launch a rocket that could carry a cat. There are some Russian postage stamps honouring 'space dogs'. A number of other dogs followed in her pawprints, up until the mid-1960s many of them were successfully returned to Earth, but some were not. She is remembered on a memorial at Star City, outside Moscow ( right). However, the real story, only revealed more recently, is that she died from overheating and stress just a few hours into the mission. According to what the Russians said at the time, she suffered no ill-effects while in orbit, but after a few days her batteries and air supply ran out and she died. The then Soviet Union experimented in the later 1950s with dogs in capsules on the edge of space then in 1957 Laika, a mongrel dog who became very well known, was launched in Sputnik 2. There was a report of a cat being used in a space launch several years earlier, in 1958/9, but we were later reliably informed that the launch was cancelled at the last minute. While Félicette may not be one of the best-known cats in the world, maybe she should be, as she became the first of only two cats that we've been able to confirm were sent into space. Including by ourselves until that point) actually never existed! When we learned that Félix (commonly stated to be the name of the first cat in space, Purr-n-Fur UK | Felicette the space cat, and the mythical FelixĪrticles in Famous Felines are written byĬertain features on these pages use JavaScriptĪfter first uploading this page in 2004, there was a new and unexpected twist to the story in 2014, ![]()
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