Kurt Caswell - Laika's Window

A great crowd gathered at the Royal Palace. All the chateau windows and the rooftops were crowded with onlookers. The balloon had been constructed hastily, in just four days’ time, when the intended paper balloon—a beautiful thing measuring seventy feet high by forty feet wide, with a background colored in azure and ornamented with gold in representation of the sun—was destroyed by rain. For this new balloon, the brothers had turned again to taffeta, that crisp, smooth silk fabric, and coated it with varnish against all weathers. It was not as big but equally stunning, a bright blue bulb ribboned by two golden bands.

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.

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.

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.

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.