In the US, Holloman and White Sands are ground zero for balloon test flights as well as rocket and missile test flights, rocket test flights carrying animals, and nuclear tests. While nearby Roswell, New Mexico, has built a tourist industry around the supposed 1947 crash landing of an alien spacecraft, the US military has confirmed that what really came down on that June day was a high-altitude balloon sent up to detect sound waves from Soviet nuclear tests. Even as the Soviets would dominate the Space Race at least until the first Apollo moon landing in 1969, the United States could claim detonation of the world’s first nuclear bomb on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity Site on the north end of White Sands. That test led to the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and forced Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II.
NASA still uses high-altitude balloons in scientific research, although they are now mostly uncrewed and un-animaled, as evidenced by the 2016 flight of their Super Pressure Balloon launched from Wanaka, New Zealand. The balloon remained aloft just shy of forty-seven days, setting a flight duration record at midlatitudes. Over its thirty-five years of operation, NASA’s scientific balloon program has launched more than 1,700 balloons.
The fruit fly—that tiny fly with red eyes and a black-and-tan striped abdomen—is likely the first animal to ascend beyond the Karman line into space, which it did on a V-2 rocket on February 20, 1947, out of White Sands. German scientists developed the V-2 as a missile for Hitler’s final push toward the end of World War II. After the war, Russia and the US swept in and seized the V-2 hardware and the scientists for their own. The experiment on this particular V-2 was set up to test the effects of radiation at high altitude, one of the primary areas of research in the safety and even the feasibility of human spaceflight. You send up a bunch of fruit flies and see what condition they are in when they come back. That V-2 rocket rose to an altitude of sixty-eight miles, and then its little capsule, called the Blossom, returned to Earth on a braking chute. The fruit flies were recovered alive, and ever after, fruit flies have been our continual partners in biological research in space. Fruit flies have ascended into the upper atmosphere on balloons, on space shuttle flights, on most of the various space stations, and they have gone out and come back on biological satellite flights.
Humans owe a great debt to the ordinary fruit fly, because it does the heavy lifting when it comes to the study of genetics, both on Earth and in space. “The fruit fly has turned out to be a workhorse organism,” said Jeffrey Thomas of the Department of Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Texas Tech University’s Health Sciences Center. “From the 1940s through the 1960s no other animal was their equal in biological research. They’re underappreciated, I would say. We really wouldn’t be where we are today in biology and medicine without them.” Our understanding of basic genetics, the effects of radiation on heredity, the role of chromosomes in heredity, embryogenesis, the role of cell communication in disease—all this we owe to the fruit fly.
While fruit flies have long been part of short-term experiments in space, in 2014 NASA established the Fruit Fly Lab on the ISS to begin long-term experiments. In particular, the lab will study the effect of microgravity on fruit flies, which will help scientists understand such effects on humans. Additionally, NASA says, fruit flies will help us understand “the effects of spaceflight on the immune system, the development cycle (birth, growth, reproduction, aging), and behavior.”
A decade before Laika, the US Air Force at White Sands flew a series of monkeys into space for the Albert Project, which began with the flight of Albert I in 1948 and concluded with Albert VI in 1951. Weighing eight to ten pounds each, all of the Alberts were rhesus monkeys, except for Albert III, who was a cynomolgus monkey. Secured in protective harnesses and loaded into sealed capsules, the monkeys were anesthetized to avoid discomfort during flight. Albert I’s capsule was so cramped that when the monkey was inserted its head had to be pushed down, bending its neck at an acute angle. Before launch, someone wrote on one of the rocket’s fins, “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him well,” a misquote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the control room, the team reported that no heart rate or respiration registered on their instruments. The monkey likely died of asphyxiation, they concluded, from its bent neck. The rocket went up anyway, carrying a dead monkey, and reached an apex of thirty-seven miles. On the descent, the braking chute shredded at 25,000 feet, and the spacecraft broke apart on impact, leaving a waste of wreckage on the desert floor. Later the team confessed that they were unable to retrieve any data, but they learned something about the V-2 rockets they were working with and about capsule recovery. They would try again.
With each successive Albert flight, the resulting data led to improvements in capsule and braking design and instrumentation, but they were all failures as far as the monkeys were concerned. Albert II died when the braking chute on his spacecraft failed and he slammed into the Earth. The impact carved out a crater ten feet across and five feet deep. Albert III died when his rocket exploded during flight. Albert IV’s braking chute failed, and the capsule crashed. While Albert V flew in a new rocket design, the more reliable and higher-performance Aerobee rocket, again the braking chute failed. The rocket crashed and was lost in the desert. Eleven mice joined the flight of Albert VI, some for testing microgravity and others for testing the effects of radiation exposure in space. Albert VI went up and came down, and the chute system worked. He landed safely back on Earth. The recovery team didn’t arrive for two hours, and, trapped inside the capsule, Albert VI died of heat exhaustion in the New Mexico sun.
On December 3, 1958, newly formed NASA loaded a one-pound squirrel monkey named Gordo onto a Jupiter rocket. Gordo was also known as Old Reliable by the team that trained him because inside his little space capsule, he always fell asleep. Gordo wore a leather-lined plastic helmet and was strapped into a seat molded to his body. The rocket launched, pushing upward into the sky, Gordo enduring as much as a g-force of ten. At an altitude of about 300 miles, Gordo floated in microgravity for more than eight minutes, and on the descent the spacecraft hit 10,000mph. Instruments showed that Gordo survived all this, and in good condition, and if a man had been inside that capsule he would have survived too. The spacecraft splashed down in the Atlantic 1,500 miles downrange, but the recovery team was unable to locate it. After a six-hour search, it became clear that little Gordo would remain out there, forever lost at sea.
By 1959 the Soviets had put dozens of dogs into space (but not into orbit) and recovered them safely. The US had a couple of satellites in orbit, but with the exception of the fruit flies, it had failed every attempt at recovering a biological spaceflight. If the US was going to get a man safely into space before the Soviet Union, it had to get an animal safely into space first. And the US finally did with the flight of Able and Baker. Able was a rhesus monkey born in a pet shop in Independence, Missouri, and Baker was an eleven-ounce squirrel monkey from the jungles of Peru. The pair flew with a host of other biological experiments testing the effects of microgravity and radiation on living systems. According to Colin Burgess and Chris Dubbs in their seminal work, Animals in Space, these other passengers included “corn and mustard seeds, fruit fly larvae, human blood, mould spore and fish eggs, as well as sea-urchin shells and sperm, carefully triggered to produce fertilization during flight.”