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At an ever-intensifying rate, animals, insects and other forms of biological life were fired into space in the 1960s and 1970s. Many perplexing questions needed to be resolved about survival in space, and these two decades would see creatures from nations such as China, France, the United States and the Soviet Union sent on missions of increasing complexity in order to answer these questions.

The advent of the space shuttle, which flew for the first time in 1981, presented researchers with an ideal platform for the study of animal and plant life in space, as hundreds of biological experiments could be carried aloft, examined or pursued in relative comfort.

There was a particularly intense decade in the use of animals in the development of space travel, from 1951 to 1961. It was a period of transition, from the first successful suborbital flight of the Soviet dogs Tsygan and Dezik to the orbital flight of the U.S. schimpanzee Enos.