50 ANIMALS THAT HAVE BEEN TO SPACE

What may stick with readers south of the border—aside from a jaundiced view of two Cold War powers “racing to get the first soldiers into space” and using animals in “sacrificial” roles to advance that agenda—is the sheer variety of animal astronauts. Following nods to the Montgolfier brothers and other pioneers, the authors go on in one- or two-page entries to chronicle purposes, courses, and outcomes for 50 missions, mostly from the space programs’ earlier days, in which monkeys and chimps flew for the U.S., Laika and other dogs for the USSR, cats (inexplicably) for France, and later on a great range of birds, bugs, fish, spiders, “ant-stronauts,” mice, and more…with and without human accompaniment. Most actually survived their journeys, even a pair of steppe tortoises looped around the moon and Enos (a chimp who, no doubt to the envy of many fellow astronauts, got away with throwing feces at a visiting politician because “he was a hotshot and good at his job”), whose 1961 Mercury capsule suffered multiple failures in orbit. Each visually crowded entry squeezes in a boxed mission profile and one or, usually, more period photos. Resource lists at the end supplement frequent leads throughout to online research reports or videos. Human figures are, with rare exceptions, white.

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