Spark and Perl go looking
Why did animals go to space before people?
To find out whether a living body could survive the trip.
Nobody knew what the shaking, the weightlessness and the fall back home would do to it.
Who went first?
Fruit flies, in 1947. They went up in a rocket and came back down alive.
Flies! And then?
Monkeys and mice, and then dogs.
In 1957 a dog called Laika was the first animal to go all the way round the Earth.
Did she come home?
No. There was no way yet to bring her back, and people knew that before she went.
Many people are still sad about it, and it is one reason people are much more careful now.
Did any dogs come back?
Yes. In 1960 two dogs, Belka and Strelka, went round the Earth and landed safely.
Later, one of Strelka’s puppies went to live with an American president’s family, at the White House.
So then people could go.
The very next year. In America a chimpanzee called Ham flew up and came back fine,
and that spring a Soviet cosmonaut called Yuri Gagarin went all the way round the Earth.
Are there still animals up there?
Sometimes, on the space station: mice, little fish, even water bears — animals smaller than a grain of sand.
They help us learn what months without weight do to a body, so that astronauts stay healthy.
Yes — a bright steady light crossing in about four minutes.
It never blinks, so you know it is not a plane.
Back to the story: The International Space Station
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