The Horsfield’s tortoise, sometimes called the Russian tortoise, makes a great aquarium pet because it is small (between five and ten inches long) and requires little food. The male Horsfield’s is known for its wild courtship display, shucking and diving with his head and biting the front legs of the female, little tortoise kisses, to get her in the mood. If she accepts him, he will mount her from behind and sound a series of high-pitched barbaric squeaks.
On the night of September 14, 1968, the tortoises went up from Baikonur, the Soviet Union’s massive spaceport in Kazakhstan. Temperatures were mild, not too hot and not too cold, and the vast and empty desert was lit by the afterglow of the cosmos. The rocket blasted off and rose into the starry sky above the desert, an upside-down candle ascending into the heavens. At the time of launch, the tortoises had already been in the spacecraft for twelve days with no food. Once in Earth orbit, the team parked the Zond 5 for a while as they made a series of system checks, then the third-stage engine fired, and the spacecraft moved onward to the moon.
On September 18 the spacecraft rounded the moon, flying 1,200 miles above its surface, and headed straight back. It did not enter orbit. An attitude control sensor had failed on the flight out, and now on the return a second sensor failed, resulting in difficulty guiding the spacecraft as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere. It would have to make what NASA called “a direct ballistic entry,” like a bullet breaking through. The ground team would not know precisely where the capsule was going to land until it came very near to landing. It splashed down in the Indian Ocean on September 21. A Soviet Academy of Sciences ship, the Borovichi, located the capsule bobbing in heavy seas and recovered it while a US Navy patrol looked on. Just what were the Soviets up to? Oh, probably just beating the Americans in the Space Race again.
The capsule arrived in Moscow on October 7. It had been a good month now since the tortoises were sealed inside without food. When the Soviet team finally opened the capsule on October 11, they found that the tortoises had lost 10 percent of their body weight, but they were generally healthy and had powerful appetites.
In 1972 five pocket mice flew to the moon on Apollo 17, the final moon mission. Because pocket mice are desert dwellers and do not require water (they take in all the water they need from their food), they make excellent space travelers. These mice, one female and four males—affectionately called Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey by the astronauts who flew that mission—were to test the effects of high-energy radiation on the body, especially on the retina of the eyes and on the brain and skin. Each mouse had a radiation detector surgically implanted into its brain. You can imagine these devices like little hats on the top of their heads, transforming the mice into cyborgs.
High-energy radiation, or cosmic radiation, strikes the Earth without cease. These particles are mostly hydrogen nuclei traveling at near the speed of light. Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere slow these particles down, and they give their energy to them, so that we are perfectly safe down here on the surface. Life would not have evolved and flourished here without shielding from cosmic radiation. Outside this shield, these particles penetrate living tissue and damage or destroy it. As the Apollo moon missions were operating outside Earth’s protective shielding, they were ideal for research on the effects of cosmic radiation on travelers from Earth.
Apollo 17 (and the other Apollo flights) consisted of a three-man crew: commander Eugene Cernan and pilot and geologist Harrison Schmitt would descend to the moon’s surface, while pilot Ronald Evans would remain with the mice in the command module in orbit around the moon. The mice required nothing from the astronauts. They were set up in a sealed aluminum canister, inside of which were individual tubes, one for each mouse and one empty tube to help with ventilation. The tubes protected the mice from tumbling about too severely, but they were free to move inside the tube, where they feasted on a prepared seed mixture (about thirty grams per day each). An identical canister with five other mice would remain at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California as a control study.
Apollo 17 launched at night from Cape Canaveral on December 7, 1972, the first night launch in the US carrying astronauts. Half a million people turned out to watch as the massive Saturn V rose into the dark sky, lighting up the Indian and Banana Rivers. Designed and developed by Werner von Braun, Arthur Rudolph, and their team in Huntsville, the Saturn V is the largest, most powerful rocket ever to fly; it had to be to lift and deliver the hardware required for the moon missions. It stood taller than the Statue of Liberty, weighed 6.5 million pounds when fueled, and lifted 310,000 pounds of payload into Earth orbit. The payload alone is the equivalent of about thirty-one elephants, and pretty big ones too. Most everyone watching on-site and on television knew that Cernan, Schmitt, and Evans were on board, but few likely knew about Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey, those little four-legged beasts riding that great energy into the heavens.
Cernan and Schmitt spent three days on the moon in a region known as the Taurus-Littrow valley. They lived and worked out of the lander, Challenger, as if on a long weekend camping trip in a remote location with no atmosphere. Their primary mission was to sample lunar highland material (the lighter spots on the surface of the moon when you look at it from Earth) and investigate possible new volcanic activity (less than three billion years old). Each day they ventured out for about seven hours, driving their Lunar Roving Vehicle (which is still up there) to various locations to take measurements, collect rocks, and deploy explosive packages that, when detonated, would generate data useful in mapping the top few kilometers of the moon’s crust. On the first day Cernan caught the hammer attached to his space suit on the right rear fender of the rover and broke it. He and Schmitt fashioned a new fender out of a lunar map, duct tape, and clamps from a telescope. The mission broke a number of records that still stand, including longest duration moon landing, longest duration in lunar orbit, and largest lunar sample returned to Earth.
What were the mice doing during all this time in the command module with Evans? Eating seeds and absorbing cosmic radiation. Crew members of the previous Apollo missions had reported seeing flashes of light when they closed their eyes, usually when they put the lights out in the spacecraft for a sleep period. These flashes, or streaks of light, occurred about once every thirty seconds. The flashes were not observed on the surface of the moon but during the journey to the moon, in orbit around it, and in orbit around the Earth. While the mice collected data with the radiation detectors (dosimeters) implanted into their heads, Evans wore a specialized helmet to track cosmic rays (the Apollo Light Flash Moving Emulsion Detector). The result was that, yes, the flashes were indeed caused by cosmic rays. The next question was, were these cosmic rays harmful, especially to the retina of the eyes and to the brain? When the mice returned to Earth, researchers might find out.
After splashdown on December 19, the mice were transported aboard the USS Ticonderoga to a medical facility in Pago Pago, the territorial capital of American Samoa. In a letter to Colin Burgess, co-author of Animals in Space, Delbert Philpott, the principal investigator for the pocket mice experiment, tells the story of transporting the mice to his lab. Philpott knew that in the moist tropical air of the Pacific islands the canister might heat up and kill Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey. He would have to hurry to get them from the ship at dockside to the lab facility at Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital. Speed limits on the island were painfully slow and rigorously enforced, and in a moment of roguish genius, Philpott realized that the only vehicle on the island that could push beyond these limits was an ambulance. So off he went in an ambulance to pick up the canister. He found a note from one of the astronauts attached: “For what it’s worth, I think I hear scratching on the inside.” So they were still alive, but they wouldn’t be for long if he tarried. The ambulance took off, breaking the speed limit to get the mice to the lab where they could crack open the canister and let them out, give them water and food and air-conditioning, whatever they needed.