Félicette

It started with a headline in the Guardian, some old memory of Minitel made me click. I stopped reading after I read about Félicette. A cat that went into space and came back alive. And apparently it was the first animal to survive a space flight. There is a link in the article to a French video from 1963. It shows the testing and selecting the right cat, there were a couple in the laboratory and all had electrodes in on their brains attached. Of course this was not the first animal in space. People of my age might remember Leika the dog who orbited the earth and was sometimes mentioned alongside Yuri Gagarin. But all the animals that went into space before this cat did not return alive! After seeing the video I learned the only in 2019 there was a statue for this cat erected at the International Space University in Illkirch-Graffenstaden. There is also a huge fan whom has written a book about her.