Kurt Caswell - Laika's Window

Since those early rocket flights in the Soviet Union and the United States, five more nations have flown animals in space: France, Argentina, China, Japan, and Iran. The list of the kinds of animals, and also plants, sent into space is dizzying and includes quail and quail eggs, butterflies, mollusks, various fish, including the mummichog minnow and the oyster toadfish (a hideous beast at best), various mosses, oat and mung bean seedlings, newts, worms of all sorts, and nematodes, which come in all sorts too. Cats, rabbits, rats, Madagascar hissing cockroaches (thanks to Russia), and not to leave out molds, yeasts, crickets, snails, ladybugs, ants, moths, houseflies, fruit flies, gnats, bees, scorpions, spiders, all kinds of cells including chunks of human skin (which are groups of cells), and of course, guinea pigs.

In 2016 SpaceX launched eight species of fungi found growing at the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site in the former Soviet Union into space. Scientists are studying the way these fungi manage radiation, a primary challenge for all living things traveling in space. Also in 2016 several strains of herpes were flown into space to study how and why the virus worsens, and even mutates, in microgravity. Two-thirds of all humans carry herpes, and many of us do not know we carry it. This research is especially important for crew members on long-duration spaceflights. The first flower grown in space is the zinnia, which unfurled on the International Space Station in 2016, and NASA has been growing red romaine lettuce on the station too, studying fresh food production for an eventual journey to Mars. Like rats on sixteenth-century sailing ships, microbes have hitched rides into space in and on spacecraft. A group of scientists are now tracking and studying the microbial life flourishing on the ISS. In fact, a bacterium, Solibacillus kalamii (named after scientist A. P.J. Abdul Kalam, who became the eleventh president of India), has been found only on the ISS—it has not been found on Earth—suggesting that life from Earth can mutate in such a way as to manage life in space, or that life is already out there. And out there on Mars, despite our best efforts to prevent it, microbial life from Earth likely holds on to various landers and surface rovers. In late 2016 NASA steered the Mars rover Curiosity away from possible water sources on the red planet so as not to contaminate them with Earth microbes.

Other objects, too, surprising and strange, have been sent into space, among them the light saber Luke Skywalker used in Return of the Jedi , images of Playboy models secreted away in the task notebooks of Apollo 12 astronauts, a wheel of Gruyère cheese, dinosaur bones, Coke and Pepsi, a Pizza Hut pizza (literally the first out-of-this world delivery), a Buzz Lightyear toy, Amelia Earhart’s watch, and samples of the remains of the late Gene Roddenberry (creator of Star Trek ), James Doohan (who played Scotty in the original Star Trek ), and astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, whose sample of remains reached Pluto on July 14, 2015, on NASA’s New Horizons probe, because the man discovered it.

As far as anyone knows, the first animal test flight in the history of the world took place on November 19, 1783, at Versailles. This is, of course, not including the certainty that for the past two hundred thousand years, boys have tested the reliability of gravity by cruelly launching little animals off high places. The Montgolfier brothers, Joseph and Étienne, were not cruel boys, however, but young inventors and entrepreneurs with talent in mechanics and science who had been experimenting with hot air balloons for about a year. They arrived at this work, so the story goes, when Joseph, the starry-eyed dreamer with a reputation for reciting Voltaire, was drying his wife’s chemise by the heat of a wood fire. Filling temporarily with hot air, the garment billowed up. In his excitement, Joseph’s mind began to wander: could not a sack or balloon of some kind fill with such air and so be borne aloft? If so, could not a balloon of greater size be constructed, filled with the heat of a fire, and so bear something of weight, a man, for example, up into the sky? With such a balloon, Joseph wondered while clutching his wife’s chemise, was it possible that a man could fly?

Another account has Joseph gazing at a painting of the siege of Gibraltar, that three-year failed attempt by Spanish and French forces to take Gibraltar from the British during the American Revolution. The siege was even then under way, and Joseph, a good Frenchman, his mind bent on aiding his country, recalled a past moment watching sparks drawn up a flue. He wondered if men, like sparks, might be drawn up on a draft of air from a fire, up and over the castle walls, thus impregnating impregnable Gibraltar. Flight has always been associated with military conquest.

It was time to perform an experiment. In his rented rooms in Avignon, Joseph stretched a bolt of taffeta around a light wood frame and lit a wad of paper in the cavern of it, and the whole thing floated up to the ceiling. As Charles Coulston Gillispie reports in The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation, 1783–1784 , Joseph immediately wrote to his brother, Étienne: “Get in a supply of taffeta and of cordage, quickly, and you will see one of the most astonishing sights in the world.”

Luckily the family business was papermaking, a high-tech industry in the eighteenth century. The brothers set to work experimenting with paper balloons, which became known as Montgolfières, and the hot air that inflated them as Montgolfier gas. Gas, because the brothers had yet to understand that the fire heated the air, and that hot air is lighter than cold air, so it rises. Instead they concluded that the combination of fire and smoke caused a chemical reaction with the air and the resulting gas filled the balloon. No matter how it worked, it worked, and so the brothers partnered with several interested friends, including Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, a successful manufacturer of wallpapers. Surely, writes Gillispie in his book, it is due to the association of Réveillon with the work of the Montgolfiers “that the iconography of balloons has evolved out of the patterning of eighteenth-century wallpaper.”

On that day in Versailles, the brothers planned a public demonstration. They had already put claim to their invention (and so the invention of aviation) with a previous public demonstration, which launched from Annonay on June 4, 1783. But this flight in Versailles would be different. First, the Montgolfier brothers had to contend with the success of another ballooning pair, Jacques Alexandre César Charles and Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, who had only a month before launched a helium-filled balloon from the Champ de Mars. Second, the brothers were to stage this launch before the Royal Palace and before royalty—namely the king, Louis XVI, and his queen, Marie Antoinette (not so much later, both would lose their heads to the guillotine). And third, the brothers would raise the stakes by flying a living animal. After some deliberation on what animal to fly (some suggested a dog, so that while ascending into the sky, the crowd of onlookers could hear it bark), the brothers settled on a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. The duck and the rooster were control animals for the sheep. The duck was expected to manage the altitude without trouble, but what would happen to the rooster, no one knew. And what happened to that sheep during the flight, a mammal with a physiology not unlike human beings, would be akin to what would happen to a man, so the thinking went. If the sheep came down no worse for wear, then the brothers would most certainly make plans for a manned flight. They called the sheep Monteauciel, meaning “ascend to the sky.”