Félicette, the First Cat in Space, Finally Gets a Memorial
via Smithsonian
Félicette, a petite tuxedo kitty, wasn’t the first non-human animal to leave our planet’s atmosphere. In their early bids for an eventual lunar landing, both the United States and the former USSR sent their own menageries of creatures into space, including a dog named Laika in 1957 and a chimpanzee called Ham in 1961. These efforts, using larger and larger creatures, were—though ethically hazy—intended as trial runs for humans, in part to study the effects of microgravity on mammalian bodies.