Space Dogs
The first spaceflight with a science payload came in 1946.
In May 1946, a V-2 launched by the Army carried a cosmic ray experiment built by the Applied Physics Laboratory. A few years later, APL would set another record. “Another APL cosmic ray experiment on March 5, 1948 from White Sands was the first space launch on a rocket not originally designed as a weapon — the Aerobee sounding rocket,” McDowell says.
Soon after, in 1947, a V-2 rocket launched by the United States launched and returned a precious payload: the first pictures of Earth ever taken in space. This was just a month after the first animals had reached space — in this case, fruit flies. The first large animal, a macaque, or type of monkey, made it to space aboard a V-2 in 1949. His name was Albert II, named for his predecessor Albert, who had reached high altitudes but failed to make it to the boundary of space.
By 1951, the Soviets had sent two dogs, Dezik and Tsygan, to space. Both were recovered safely. But on July 29, 1951 — just one week after the pup’s first flight — Dezik and another space dog, Lisa, were killed when their parachute failed to deploy.
Accidents were the exception, not the norm, in these early animal suborbital experiments, but on February 21, 1958, two Soviet spacedogs, Palma and Pushok, were killed when their cabin decompressed. That was just a few months after Laika, the first animal to reach orbit, had died on November 3, 1957, when she overheated a few hours after reaching orbit.
While those are gruesome stories, the United States didn’t have a great track record either. In 1951, a monkey died aboard an Aerobee rocket experiment. The rocket hadn’t made it to space, reaching altitudes of 38 miles (61 km) before coming crashing down, killing the unnamed monkey on impact. Most other animals lost by American suborbital rockets were mice, however.
Suborbital spaceflight never went away, of course.
Sounding rockets are still used today. But an interesting experiment took place just weeks after the Sputnik 1 launch. Fritz Zwicky, a Caltech astrophysicist who was a pioneer in dark matter research, wanted to send a sounding rocket up, and perform an experiment after it reached space: it would explode out a couple of projectiles which would, with all hope, achieve escape velocity from the Earth system.
The Aerbee rocket reached an altitude of 54 miles on October 16, 1957, just above the military definition of space but below later figures. The tiny projectiles were reported to have left the Earth-Moon system after their thermite fuel discharged and shot toward parts unknown. While Zwicky claimed they left the system, McDowell doubts the veracity of those claims. “It was part of a series of experiments to fire artificial meteors of know composition into the atmosphere to let astronomers figure out the mass of natural meteors from their brightness,” McDowell says. Indeed, Zwicky had been attempting the experiment since 1947, succeeding 10 years later.