The Forgotten Space Cat

On February 20, 1947, a captured German V-2 rocket roared off the launch pad at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico and streaked off into the sky. Within three minutes, it reached an apogee of 109.4 kilometres – just above the 100 kilometre Karman Line that defines the boundary of outer space. Though completely forgotten today, this launch was a historic one, for the rocket carried passengers: a group of ordinary fruit flies who became the first complex organisms to travel into space and be successfully recovered. Over the next two decades, they would be followed by hundreds of other animals from mice and rats and guinea pigs to turtles, frogs, and beetles, who bravely paved the way for the first human astronauts. The American space program preferred to use primates like rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees, while the Soviets preferred dogs – all of which were considered even-tempered, cooperative and easy to train. Seemingly missing from this menagerie of early spacefarers are cats, which are notoriously none of these things. Yet in 1963 the French space program, apparently unaware of the expression “like herding cats”, launched a cat named Félicette into the wild blue yonder. This is the forgotten story of history’s first – and thus far only – cat-stronaut.

Just like its British, American, and Soviet counterparts, the early French space program benefited greatly from German rocket engineers and research captured at the end of the Second World War. In 1946, thirty German engineers employed by the French Centre d’Etudes de Projectiles Autopropulsés or Centre for the Study of Self-Propelled Missiles began development of a “Super V-2” ballistic missile based on wartime designs, which would be capable of lofting a 1,000 kilogram payload over a range of 3,600 kilometres. However, the design was plagued with technical difficulties and French government was reluctant to fund the project, so in 1949 CEPA cancelled the Super V-2 and pivoted to the development of a simpler and cheaper sounding rocket one-tenth the size for use in scientific research. Dubbed Véronique, a portmanteau of the Vernon – the town were the rocket was developed – and electronique, the rocket measured six metres tall, weighed 1,000 kilograms, and was fuelled by a combination of kerosene and nitric acid. Uniquely among sounding rockets, Véronique was wire-guided for the first 55 metres of its flight, using thin guidance wires trailing out from fold-out fins. This eliminated the need for the tall launch towers used by most other sounding rockets, keeping the rocket stable until it had reached a high enough airspeed for its fixed guidance fins to take over.

The first Véronique flight took place on August 2, 1950 from Suippes in northeastern France. Test flights would continue at various sites in mainland France until May 1952, when the Centre Intrerarmées d’essays d’Engins Spéciaux or Inter-Army Special Vehicles Test Centre opened in the Sahara Desert near Hammaguir in French Algeria. These early tests were disappointing, the unexpectedly low thrust of the rocket giving it a scientifically useless apogee of 65 kilometres. However, in 1957 a lighter version with an apogee of 135 kilometres was developed dubbed the Véronique AGI – short for Année Géophysique Internationale or International Geophysical Year. The IGY was an international project lasting from 1957 to 1958 in which teams from around the world cooperated conduct research on the earth and its environment. It was this project which prompted the Soviet Union to launch Sputnik 1 – the world’s first artificial satellite – on October 4, 1957, kicking off the Space Race – and for more on this wild and wacky period in spaceflight history, please check out our previous video ‘Kaputnik’: America’s Largely Forgotten Disastrous First Attempt to Launch a Satellite.

By the early 1960s, the United States and Soviet Union were firmly locked in a race to launch the first man into space, and other nations – while lacking the resources and expertise to do the same – were eager to contribute to the burgeoning Space Age. One of the major unanswered questions during this early period was what effects the alien and hostile environment of outer space would have on the human body, with many physiologists fearing that microgravity would prevent astronauts from swallowing or properly digesting food and drink, or so thoroughly scramble their inner ears that they would be completely incapacitated by vertigo and nausea. Such fears had to be thoroughly addressed before the first human astronaut set foot in a spacecraft.

In 1961, French President Charles de Gaulle signed into existence the Centre National d’Etudes Spaciales or CNES, officially launching the French space program. That same year, the Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherches de Médecine Aéronautique, in cooperation with the CNES, launched a program to study the physiological effects of spaceflight on living organisms. For this research, CERMA scientists chose animals whose physiology and neurology were already well-known, starting with rats. A batch of six laboratory-bred rats was selected for testing, the animals having electrodes implanted in three regions of their brains in order to monitor their neurological response. Over a period of 30 weeks, the six rat-stronauts were run through a battery of rigorous stress tests including spells in isolation chambers and centrifuges. One by one, the subjects were eliminated until only one remained: a one-year-old white male rat dubbed Hector. On February 22, 1961, Hector was launched from the Hammaguir facility aboard a Véronique AGI rocket, reaching an apogee of 110 kilometres before safely reentering the atmosphere and parachuting to earth. Throughout the flight, he remained alert and calm, a result which boded well for future human spacefarers. This feat made France the third nation to successfully launch an animal into space and recover it alive.

Following two more successful rat flights on October 15 and 18, 1961, CERMA moved on to a larger animal for which they also had extensive neurological data: the common house cat. In 1963, the scientists purchased a batch of 14 cats from a Paris pet dealer – all female as these were believed to have a calmer demeanour. All were given numbers instead of names to prevent the scientists from becoming emotionally attached. Like the rats before them, these prospective cat-stronauts had monitoring electrodes implanted in their skulls and, over the course of two weeks, were steadily acclimatized to all the stresses they would encounter during their brief suborbital flights, including being strapped into a tiny, claustrophobic cat carrier, being bombarded with recordings of rocket engine noises, and being spun in a centrifuge at accelerations up to 7Gs – and to learn about another truly bizarre experiment conducted on our feline friends, please check out our previous video The Curious Case of the Cat That Was Turned Into a Living Telephone FOR SCIENCE!!!!!!

On October 8, 1963, six cats were selected from the initial batch of 14 and transported to the launch site in Algeria. Then, on October 17, cat C341, the calmest of the bunch, was selected for launch. A tuxedo cat weighing 2.5 kilograms, C341 had been a stray on the streets of Paris just weeks before being picked up and sold to CERMA. In addition to her brain electrodes, C341 was fitted with electrocardiogram or EKG electrodes on her hind legs to monitor her heart rate, a microphone on her chest to monitor her breathing, and two more electrodes on her forelegs that would deliver mild electric shocks. This allowed scientists to monitor her brain’s reaction to said shocks and determine if her neurological responses were within normal bounds.

Finally, on October 18, 1963, C341 was loaded into the nosecone of Véronique rocket number 47 and, at 8:09 AM local time, blasted off from the Algerian desert. The suborbital flight reached an apogee of 152 kilometres and lasted a total of 13 minutes, during which C341 experienced a peak acceleration of 9.6 Gs and 5 minutes of weightlessness. Nonetheless, telemetry from her various bio-monitors indicated that she remained perfectly calm throughout, exhibiting only minor changes to her hear and breathing rate. At apogee, the nosecone containing the world’s first astro-cat detached, reentered the atmosphere, and parachuted back to the desert floor, where it and its feline passenger were soon recovered by helicopter.

Upon the French Government’s announcement of the successful flight, the public immediately dubbed the hitherto nameless C341 “Félix” after the popular cartoon character. However, when it was revealed that C341 was actually female, this was changed to the female form Félicette and officially adopted by CERMA. Six days later on October 24, the French attempted to launch another cat into space, but a malfunction caused the rocket to careen off course and crash into the desert floor, taking its unnamed feline payload with it.

And if all you animal lovers out there have found this story upsetting so far, then you might want to turn off the video now, because it does not have a happy ending. For despite putting her life on the line for science and completing her mission with flying colours, two months after her pioneering flight, Félicette was euthanized so that scientists could dissect her brain. Tragically, they discovered nothing of scientific value. All but one of Félicette’s training cohort also met this fate. The health of the remaining cat began to deteriorate shortly after receiving her brain electrodes, so the electrodes were removed and the cat adopted as the CERMA scientists’ mascot. They named her Scoubidou, after the scoubido braided collar she wore around her neck. It is worth noting that by the time of Félicette’s flight, nine humans had already successfully flown into space, making the scientific value of the mission somewhat dubious.

From this early start, the French space program grew by leaps and bounds. On November 26, 1965, CNES performed the first successful launch of the Diamant rocket, the first expendable launch system to be designed and built entirely within France – and, indeed, Western Europe. The rocket carried Astérix, the first French satellite, into orbit, making France the sixth nation after the Soviet Union, United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy – and only the third to do so using its own indigenously-developed rocket. France later spearheaded the founding of the European Space Agency and developed the Ariane series of rockets, which have successfully launched over 250 payloads since 1979.

However, amid these successes, Félicette has been largely forgotten, overshadowed by more famous astro-animals such as Laika the dog and Ham the chimpanzee. And while several countries like former French colonies Chad and Niger issued commemorative stamps in her honour, few of these depictions resembled the actual cat, with many even misnaming her “Felix”.

This began to change in 2017, when Matthew Serge Guy, a creative director at the Anomaly London advertising agency, accidentally stumbled upon Félicette’s story:

“Around 6 months ago whilst at work, I came across a tea towel in the staff kitchen commemorating the 50th anniversary of the cat who went to space There was no name for the cat on the towel, nor did it resemble Félicette. After Googling it, I became fascinated with Félicette’s story, how it had been forgotten over the years, and misattributed. It felt like something big should be done to right these wrongs.”

That same year, Guy launched a kickstarter campaign to fund a bronze statue to commemorate Félicette. By April 2018, the campaign met its £40,000 funding target, and sculptor Gill Parker was commissioned to create the statue. On December 18, 2019, the finished piece, depicting Félicette standing atop a globe and staring up at the stars, was unveiled on the grounds of the International Space University near Strasbourg in eastern France. Of the memorial, Matthew Guy later wrote:

“It’s [important] to note that Félicette, alongside many other animals that have braved space travel in the name of science, was ultimately an unwilling participant in this experiment. For this mission alone she, alongside 13 other cats, experienced arduous training prior to the mission and eventually gave her life.”

And while since 1963 dozens of different animals have flown into space, including fish, newts, shrimp, worms, jellyfish, and even spiders, Félicette remains the one and only cat to travel to the Final Frontier, perhaps proving the adage that the French copy no-one, and no-one copies the French.

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