Dogs vs. Monkeys: The Animals That Went to Space Before Humans

BarcelonaBefore Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, plenty of creatures orbited above human heads. During the 1950s, the Soviets and Americans took their rivalry beyond our planet, starting a space race that would immortalize names like Gagarin, Neil Armstrong, Aleksei Leonov, Buzz Aldrin, and Valentina Tereshkova. But before them, there were Laika, Baker, Belka, Ham, and Strelka. The first animals in space, but not the first to fly, since in 1783 the Montgolfier brothers had placed a sheep, a duck, and a rooster inside a hot-air balloon to see what would happen if they flew.

After World War II, the Soviets and Americans launched into the conquest of space. The first animals sent were small: fruit flies aboard an American rocket in 1947 to observe the effects of high-altitude radiation. In 1949, it was Albert II's turn, the first monkey to reach more than 140 km from Earth. Albert II died on the way back when a parachute failed to work. The Americans also sent a mouse into space at a time when the Soviets were clear about which animal to trust: dogs. The reason for this commitment was simple: the Soviet Union lacked many things after World War II, but its streets were full of stray dogs.

The first documented flight with a dog was in September 1951. Bobik was chosen, but after training inside strange spheres, he fled the day before the flight. We can't blame him; those training sessions must have been torture. So the workers at the Moscow Institute of Aviation Medicine went out to find the first dog they found on the streets and named him Zib, an acronym for "Zib." replacement for the missing Bobik In Russian, Zib survived the highest flight recorded at that time. Many dogs weren't so lucky in the following years and died on experimental flights.

If the Soviets had dogs, the Americans used monkeys, which were harder and more expensive to find. The focus on monkeys became especially strong after 1958, when NASA was officially established to confront the Soviets, who had sent the first satellite into space, Sputnik, in 1957. Since no one knew how human bodies would react to weightlessness, scientists wanted to conduct tests first on chimpanzees, animals similar to us. In the 1950s, the US government authorized the purchase of a few from the Belgian Congo, which were transported to a base in New Mexico. The first chimpanzees were very young and mischievous. In fact, two of them somehow escaped from their cages and flipped switches in a room, triggering the alarm as if communist spies had entered. In reality, it was the two little animals playing. Two chimpanzees were destined for very long training sessions, as scientists trained them to perform tasks inside the spacecraft to see how they reacted once in orbit. To train them, electric shocks were applied to their feet if they did the wrong thing. However, if they pulled the correct lever, they were given fruit. This way, they learned to pull the levers just the way the scientists wanted. Apparently, the Soviets also valued chimpanzees, but found them harder to find and were skeptical about their impulsive nature. Furthermore, the first Soviet spacecraft could be controlled from Earth, with manual controls that were only to be used in emergencies. The Americans did want ships that could be controlled from inside, so they needed to test the chimpanzees pulling levers.

But the Soviets seemed to be ahead of the game. In 1958, the Soviet Union announced to the world that they had successfully sent a dog into space, the first mammal to orbit planet Earth: Laika, who died inside the spacecraft. This dog, a mix of husky and spitz, became world-famous for that suicidal journey aboard Sputnik-2. A suicidal journey, since the operation to return her was not planned. She was sent to her death after being selected from a group of dogs captured on the streets of Moscow, always female, because they were considered to have better temperaments. Initially, Laika was called Kudryavka (little curly), but when she barked during a presentation broadcast on the radio, she was renamed Laika, "thief" in Russian. Laika was equipped with sensors and a spacesuit with metal straps for a flight that was torture. Laika was frightened by that ascent, and her heart rate tripled its normal rate. Furthermore, Sputnik-2 lost part of its heat shield, and the capsule's temperature rose so much that Laika likely died just upon reaching space due to the high temperatures. With her body inside, Sputnik-2 continued orbiting for five months until its fall. The Soviets explained that Laika had lived for a few days before dying, creating a more epic tale, although this was false.

The American counterattack came on May 28, 1959, when NASA launched the PGM-19 Jupiter missile from Cape Canaveral. Instead of an explosive charge, it carried two monkeys: Baker and Able, a Peruvian squirrel monkey, and Able. They were chosen for their 16-minute flight into space, before returning to Earth alive thanks to parachute capsules. In Huntsville, Alabama, people left bananas as a memento at the grave.

On August 19, 1960, the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik 5 capsule, containing forty mice, two rats, a rabbit, fruit flies, and a pair of dogs that became more famous than many army generals: Belka ("White") and Strelka ("White") became so famous that even today Russian children read about them. On that trip, doctors monitored the animals' reactions through cameras, which at first worried them because Belka and Strelka initially showed no reaction. The sensation of weightlessness left them disoriented. Belka and Strelka were received with full honors upon their return and even visited the Kremlin. Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow. One of Strelka's puppies, Pushinka, was given by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to the family of American President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, to get closer to Earth. spectacular dog show.

It was up to the Americans to take a step forward. And they did so with Ham, on January 31, 1961, the first great ape cosmonaut. Redstone, a trip during which he activated the levers just as he had been taught with that cruel method of shocks. Ham returned to Earth, very scared, thanks to the capsule's parachute. It was not possible to get him back into the capsule to take photographs, as he was panicking. Barely three months after his trip, the United States sent its first cosmonaut, Alan Shepard. He was 25 years old, and his ashes were buried at the base in New Mexico, where there is a space dedicated to the great American heroes who went into space.

The era of sending dogs and monkeys was coming to an end, although animals, such as squirrels and especially mice, continued to be sent for scientific purposes. There are several mice at the international station, which flies over us every day.