Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In order to understand the story of the first animals in space, it is important to place them in their context within the advances of rocketry and space flight. The rockets that would eventually fly them had fascinating histories, as did the people who designed them. As rockets grew bigger and more powerful, and as their uses diversified from weapons to possible deliverers of humans into orbit, the need to see if living creatures could survive their flights grew stronger. First, however, the rockets had to fly.

The inaugural firing of a V-2 rocket from American soil took place on 16 April 1946 at a remote military site near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Newly painted, the rocket looked surprisingly striking in a gaudy white-and-black checkerboard pattern that would enable technicians to study launch film post-flight to determine the amount of spin generated during the first 20 seconds of the ascent. The missile had been meticulously checked and prepared for what should prove to be a defining moment in American rocket research.

If you had visited Moscow’s Institute of Aviation Medicine (IAM) in the summer of 1950, you might have been surprised to hear the clamour of dogs, to see them trotting about in pressure suits, and being spun in centrifuges. A cluster of small, light-furred dogs had taken up residence in that post-war summer, when the Institute was just beginning to turn its focus from the physiology of airplane to rocket flight. In the years following the Second World War, the major research thrust of the IAM was on the biological problems associated with flight.

A mere 60 years ago, not a single artificial satellite was orbiting the Earth. In fact, the programmes that would eventually put them there had hardly been set in motion. In the post-war years it was known that rockets alone could provide the sustained thrust necessary to loft anything into space, but they were a relatively new and basically unsophisticated technology. In the latter part of the Second World War they had been used as weapons of destruction, and for this reason alone the military was interested in their potential use as ballistic missiles capable of carrying warheads.

1958 was a truly momentous year in the history of space exploration. Within the confines of those 12 months, America’s first satellite, Explorer 1, was launched into orbit, while Russia retaliated by lobbing up a massive space laboratory known as Sputnik 3. On 2 April that year President Eisenhower had placed a proposal before Congress, calling for the creation of a civilian space agency to be known as NASA — the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A compromise bill was approved and passed by voice votes of both houses of Congress on 16 July and signed by the President just 13 days later.

June 1957. Flying more than 70,000 feet above Soviet Kazakhstan, an altitude which exceeded the reach of any Soviet interceptor aircraft, an alert pilot of an American Lockheed U-2 spy plane spotted something interesting in the distance and departed from his prescribed course to get some photographs. What he found would astound his intelligence chiefs in Washington. He had inadvertently stumbled upon the Baikonur launch facility. This was the “crown jewel of Soviet space technology, whose existence had not even been suspected”, according to the memoirs of Richard M. Bissell Jr., director of the American U-2 spy plane programme and of photo-reconnaissance at the Central Intelligence Agency [].

The Wallops Island Flight Test Range, now the NASA Wallops Flight Facility, is situated on an Atlantic Ocean barrier island on Virginia’s eastern shore. Established under NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), Wallops Island would host two crucially important spacecraft test flights using Holloman monkeys.

For the staff at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Aviation and Space Medicine, the second orbital biological flight, coming nearly 3 years after Sputnik 2, began very much like the first. A telegram arrived at the office of the director alerting him to the imminent launch of the satellite. Scheduled for 15 August, this flight would be the first since Sputnik 2 to take dogs back to space. With one major difference — this time they would return. The successful recovery of a satellite from orbit would mark a major milestone in the quest towards a manned orbital flight.

While most people would be unable to name any primate that has flown into space, those that do would likely give the names Ham or Enos. Both chimpanzees flew precursory flights in the lead-up to American manned space flights, with Ham preceding the suborbital flight of Alan Shepard, and Enos demonstrating that the orbital flight of John Glenn could go ahead.

In March 1966, two dogs just back from an orbital flight aboard the Soviet Union’s Cosmos 110 satellite were put on display at a press conference to show that they had survived their venture into space. Such press conferences had long been standard procedure during the 15-year period of the programme that launched numerous dogs on suborbital and orbital flights. It made for an impressive show to have the cute canines prance and pose for the news photographers, demonstrating that space flight was safe and that the Soviet Union did not mistreat its canine cosmonauts. However, a different scene unfolded on this occasion.