Félicette: THE INSIDE STORY OF A SPACE CAT

What happened when a feline was blasted off into space?

- Stuart Atkinson

Everyone knows the story of Laika, the first animal to orbit Earth. Photos of her feature in every book written about space, and although some people are still unaware of the awful truth of how she died in orbit at the end of her flight, almost everyone knows her name and what she did. However, the same can’t be said of Félicette, the first – and so far only – cat to fly in space.

Why is Félicette forgotten when Laika is so loved? Perhaps because she flew aboard a small French rocket, not one of the powerful boosters used by the competing Superpowers. Maybe it’s because her flight lasted 15 minutes, only carrying her to the edge of space on a suborbital ‘hop’?

Félicette was one of a group of 14 cats, all-female, ‘acquired’ by French space scientists. Having seen the successful animal flights of the US and Russia, France – which had ambitions to launch its own astronauts – decided to stage a series of missions of their own, but using cats instead of dogs or monkeys.

Before they could begin their training the cats – which were given numbers instead of names to prevent the scientists from becoming attached to them – were fitted with electrodes to enable the scientists to study and record their brain activity and connect them to monitoring equipment. If that sounds horrendous, it is, and one photo taken during the cats’ training really does show the cold contrast between how human and animal astronauts were treated.