“We didn’t force a monkey to take a test if it objected to it.” “These monkeys are almost volunteers,” he replied. Photographs of the primates before their flights are deeply distressing, their vulnerability emphasised by the cylinders in which they are rigidly encased, their tightly restrained heads peeping out from a tangle of wires.Īfter one 1959 flight in which two monkeys named Able and Miss Baker were fired on a ballistic, up-and-down trajectory into space and back, a reporter asked Captain Ashton Graybiel of the US Navy’s Aerospace Medical Institute how these animals behaved during training. Yet it appears that nobody stopped to consider that, if they looked like us, perhaps they might feel like us, too. The Americans preferred using monkeys – and, later, chimpanzees – on the grounds that these were close biological cousins to humans. There were fears, too, about what the terrific acceleration forces of a rocket launch could do to a human body, perhaps crushing it altogether. Possible health risks included heart failure, blindness, brain damage and muscle paralysis, not to mention horrific cancers from solar radiation. The list of unknowns was frighteningly long. On the podcast | Stephen Walker tells Rhiannon Davies about the history of animals in space, from fruit flies and monkeys to Laika the Soviet space dog: If space was the next new frontier – battleground, even – it was vital to know what would happen to humans in that most hostile of environments. The US was waging war against the communists. So why was it done? To the scientists involved, the reasons were clear, urgent and morally justified. On the first Albert flight, someone scrawled on the nose cone: “Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well.”Minutes later he was dead after his parachute shredded and he slammed into the ground. The chances of survival were essentially nil, as everyone involved knew.
The Americans did it first as early as 1948 in a programme called Project Albert, in which a series of rhesus monkeys – all called Albert – were inserted into the nose cones of reconstructed German V2 missiles in New Mexico and fired at colossal speeds to the edge of space Although Laika was the first animal to make it into orbit, many preceded her on rocket rides to the heavens.