Laika's Window

by Kurt Caswell

  These first flying balloons were not constructed with an onboard heat source; they were filled and then released. The brothers filled their balloon with Montgolfier gas, and at the signal, the dozen or so men holding it back on tethers all let go at once. “The machine rose majestically,” Étienne wrote to his wife, Adélaïde, “drawing after it a cage containing a sheep, a rooster, and a duck.” Then a gust of wind tilted the balloon at a sharp angle, spilling some of the hot air from the bottom now too steeply pointed up, but it soon righted itself again. It “continued on its way as majestically as ever for a distance of 1,800 fathoms [about two miles] where the wind tipped it over again so that it settled gently down on the earth” at the edge of the forest of Vaucresson. Upon inspection, the balloon had sustained some damage in the upper reaches of its curve, but the animals, Étienne reported, “were in fine shape, and the sheep had pissed in the cage.”

  Shortly after this historic flight, the Montgolfier brothers constructed a balloon twice as big to raise a man into the sky. Certainly there was no hope that the balloon would reach space (which is, in fact, not possible for any balloon because at high altitude, the air becomes too thin to keep it inflated), but just to get the thing up and then safely down was an achievement beyond compare. The honor of becoming the world’s first pilot is most always granted to the twenty-six-year-old showboater François Pilatre de Rozier, who offered himself up as a test subject and made several flights in a Montgolfier balloon. But it is nearly certain that it was Étienne himself who was first, riding a balloon into the sky from the yard of Réveillon’s wallpaper factory attached to the ground by a tether.

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  A few years after the Mongolfiers, Claude Ruggieri, an Italian living in Paris, started messing around with rockets powered by gunpowder. He was one of many such curious people romanced by the flash and bang of explosions, and his name rose to prominence as early as 1806 when he began staging public demonstrations. He loaded his rockets with mice and rats and returned them to Earth under a parachute. His family had long been in the fireworks business, and launching small animals into the sky was a logical next step. By 1830 Ruggieri was building larger and larger rockets, and he announced that he would launch a ram into the sky from the Champ de Mars. Surely he knew about the Montgolfier brothers, and with this flight perhaps he would match them. The Eiffel Tower had not yet been constructed, but the location was no less dramatic. Pitched by the excitement of the spectacle, a young man volunteered himself in place of the ram. Ruggieri accepted. Moments before launch, the French police arrived to cancel the demonstration. As it turned out, the man was not a man at all but just a boy eleven years old.

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  While the Montgolfier balloon flight was the first with animals, it certainly was not the last. Balloon flights have persisted as a relatively inexpensive and efficient way to send animals, and so science, high into the atmosphere. In 1862 Britain’s famed meteorologist Sir James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell ascended to about 35,000 feet in a balloon they called Mars. They carried with them a cage full of pigeons and marked various altitudes by casting them over the side, one by one. Pigeons can fly up to about 6,000 feet altitude, but as the balloon got higher and higher, the birds became dopier and dopier until they could not fly at all. Now when the men released them, they fell leadenly away and out of sight. Glaisher passed out at about 28,800 feet, and Coxwell, in a hypoxic stupor, saved both of their lives by releasing air from the balloon, allowing them to descend to a lower altitude. It is not known what became of the pigeons.

  Almost one hundred years later (1947–1960), the US Air Force experimented with high-altitude balloon flights carrying animal passengers out of Holloman Air Force Base, adjacent to the army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Holloman launched balloons carrying fruit flies, mice, rats, hamsters, guinea pigs, chickens, rabbits, cats, dogs, frogs, goldfish, monkeys, as well as fungi and various seeds. What happened to these animals at high altitude would happen to a human being, so the logic went. The resulting data was then used to develop life-support technologies that would allow humans to eventually endure the conditions up high.

  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.

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  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.”

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  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. Al
bert 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.”

  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.

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  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.

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  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 no
t 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.”