Able and Baker flew on May 28, 1959, reaching an apex of 360 miles altitude, where they drifted in microgravity for nine minutes. On the descent, the fantastic speed of the spacecraft subjected these two little monkeys to a crushing 38g. Able’s heart rate went from 140 beats per minute to a peak of 222, and her respiration rate tripled. Baker, the tiny squirrel monkey, experienced a bit of “cardiac inhibition,” reports call it, but her respirations remained normal. The spacecraft came down in the Atlantic, and navy frogmen helped hoist it onto the deck of the USS Kiowa. Able and Baker were unharmed, but not so for one of the recovery crewmen. As he was removing Baker from the capsule, she bit him.
Four days after her flight, Able died suddenly from a reaction to a mild anesthetic given to prepare her for the removal of the implanted ECG electrode. The anesthetic had been used routinely on hundreds of primates without incident. Her body was preserved, and she became part of the collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. Baker fared better, becoming a national celebrity and living a long life in retirement. She enjoyed an annual birthday party to celebrate her achievement and the newest advances in space technology, sometimes complete with a cake topped with bananas and strawberries. She made television appearances, and children wrote her thousands of letters. At the time of her death on November 29, 1984, she was considered the longest living squirrel monkey in captivity. She is buried at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where visitors sometimes leave bananas in memoriam.
After the Soviet Union and the United States, France was the third nation to put animals into space. As early as 1949, France was at work constructing a launch facility at Hammaguir, a remote site in the Algerian Sahara, not far from its border with Morocco. Algeria was still a French colony in those days, and the location offered a high degree of secrecy as well as a test range free of human populations. From here, the French team sent three rats into space on separate flights—Hector (1960), Castor (1962), and Pollux (1962)—each fitted with an electrode harness surgically implanted in its brain. The plan was to measure brain activity (as well as other vital signs) in microgravity, with the aim of eventual human spaceflight. The rats wore linen flight suits, which allowed them to be suspended on wires inside tubes during flight to protect them from turbulence. Hector returned to Earth alive but was euthanized some six months later for dissection and study. Castor’s flight went off course and landed thirty-seven miles outside the scheduled recovery zone. Seventy-five minutes after liftoff, the recovery helicopter finally located the spacecraft, but Castor was dead, a victim of the impossible Sahara sun. Pollux too was killed when his rocket strayed off course and came down somewhere in the empty desert, never to be found.
But when it comes to rockets, the French are best known for Félicette, the only house cat in the history of the world to fly in space. Félicette was a mostly black cat with white markings: white socks, white shoulders, and a white nose patch running up between her eyes. She had been picked up as a stray off Paris streets, where she had probably lived free on rats and handouts.
In the lab, Félicette was trained to endure the stresses of rocket flight. She was confined in a box and subjected to the simulated noise of a rocket’s engines. She was turned in a circle, around and around, into a dizzying state. She was spun on a centrifuge to test her body’s response to high g-force. And like the rats, Félicette was fitted with an electrode port surgically implanted in her brain. The port sat on the top of her head between her ears, cemented to her skull. The surgery took ten hours.
On October 18, 1963, the team dressed Félicette in a linen spacesuit and placed her in a metal restraining box with only her head sticking out. They attached an electrode cable to the port on her head, as you might plug an external hard drive into a computer. Then they inserted the cat in the box into a metal tube and sealed it up. File footage shows Félicette meowing as she goes into the tube. Meow. Meow. Meow. A steady rhythm with a steady rest interval. That small French rocket, the Véronique, rose to an altitude of ninety-seven miles, Félicette enduring an acceleration force of 9.5g. After separation from the rocket, her spacecraft came down in the sands of the Sahara. A helicopter brought out a recovery team. They opened up the spacecraft and pulled the restraining box out of the tube, and there was Félicette, still meowing.
Microgravity and the ceaseless bombardment of solar and cosmic radiation were always going to be major challenges in space travel, but if a man could not survive the rocket flight and the spacecraft’s return to Earth, there would be no space travel. And what if an astronaut had to eject from the spacecraft during his return? At what velocity and altitude was that ejection surely fatal, and at what velocity and altitude was it survivable? Only good research could help scientists and engineers answer these questions and develop technologies to manage the conditions of spaceflight. Such research would also be useful in developing safety equipment for aircraft and even for automobiles. Again, animals would be the first to test the limits of the body and of the equipment, and many of them would die doing it.
In the late 1940s through the 1950s air force colonel John Stapp and his team developed several kinds of rocket sleds that carried hogs, chimpanzees, black bears, and men along a track at very high speeds and then brought them to a sudden stop. Two of the most important measurements in these trials were g-force and jolts. Expressed using a lowercase “g” from the term “gravitational,” g is a measurement of acceleration that increases the weight of an object while its mass remains the same. If a man weighs 170 pounds, enduring an acceleration of 10g increases his weight ten times. He would weigh, at least momentarily, 1,700 pounds. Jolts are a measurement of the rate of the change in acceleration or deceleration. Whether in a rocket, an aircraft, or a car, a sudden start or stop can be the difference between life and death, and where was that line? How much could a man take? To answer these questions, Stapp ran trials on his rocket sleds, first at Edwards Air Force Base in California and then at Holloman in New Mexico, where he took command of the Aeromedical Field Laboratory.
Gil Moore, who knew Stapp, told me that his steel-rimmed glasses gave him the mild-mannered look of a high school teacher, but he was fearless. Stapp’s policy was never to let one of his men ride a rocket sled unless he had ridden it first. In some twenty-nine rocket sled trials, Stapp reached a g maximum of 45, three times the suspected limit for the human body. He suffered a number of injuries, including hemorrhaged retinas, cracked ribs, and two broken wrists. Burgess and Dubbs write that, in addition to injuries like Stapp’s, other volunteers sustained “abrasions, lost teeth fillings, concussion, and unconsciousness.”
At Edwards, Stapp built the so-called Gee-Whizz machine, running trials with 185-pound mannequins or crash dummies. File footage shows all kinds of mishaps: the sled coming off the tracks, the restraining harness snapping and vaulting the mannequin hundreds of feet beyond the sled, the mannequin’s head popping off. Chimpanzees rode the Gee-Whizz machine too, in various positions, and under anesthetic so that whatever happened to them, they would not know it. To simulate a plane crash, or perhaps a crash landing in a spacecraft, chimpanzees were positioned headfirst and lying down. Reports indicate that the maximum deceleration experienced by these chimpanzees was a top speed of 169mph stopping within eighteen feet, which resulted in a momentary g-force of 270, far beyond the g-force possible in an accelerating rocket. Death was nearly certain. According to Burgess and Dubbs, one of the researchers working on the project described what became of the chimps after these tests as “a mess.”