Sixty years ago this month, France became the first country to send a cat into space. That flight, on 18 October 1963, remains the only time a feline has ever made it into space and back again. How did the French space agency do it – and why?
The Soviets liked dogs because they were easy to train. The Americans preferred mice for their size, or monkeys for their similarities with humans.
As for cats, France remains the only country to have ever tried putting them in space.
To understand why, we have to go back to a time when space travel was only just becoming a reality, and researchers were still groping for the limits of what might and might not be possible.
“This was a period when literally this was totally new,” explains Kerrie Dougherty, a space historian who lectures at the International Space University in Strasbourg.
The story of France's space cat on the Spotlight in France podcast:
Not only would the early rockets have struggled to carry a human’s weight, there were too many unknowns to risk sending a person into space – let alone keep them circling in orbit.
“There was a serious and genuine concern, for example, that it might literally cause an astronaut to go insane, that the differing reactions that your senses would be getting from being in this totally non-normal environment and being weightless might cause an astronaut to pass out, or might cause your eyes not to work properly,” Dougherty says.
So instead the United States and the Soviet Union, the two countries leading the world into the space age, sent animals: first flies, then mice, monkeys and dogs.
In November 1957, a Moscow mutt named Laika became the first living creature to orbit Earth, aboard the Soviet rocket Sputnik 2. The thermal control system failed, exposing her to temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius for several hours; by her fourth time round the planet, it’s believed, she had died of overheating.
Nonetheless, Dougherty calls the mission “a huge achievement, and a huge surprise”: it demonstrated that it was possible for living organisms to survive – for a while, at least – in orbit.
By August 1960, when the Soviets recovered two dogs, a rabbit, 42 mice, two rats and an unspecified number of flies after a day circling the Earth, they were even coming back alive.
France's space ambitions
Even as a very distant third to the Soviets and Americans, France was determined to be a space-faring nation too.
It began building a new generation of rockets right after World War II, and by the early 1950s was testing a slim model dubbed the Véronique: a so-called sounding rocket that would shoot briefly into space before freefalling back to Earth without ever entering orbit.
The first launches blasted off from a base in the upper Sahara Desert, in what was then the French colony of Algeria.
On 22 February 1961, France became the third country to launch an animal into space: a rat named Hector, who flew aboard a Véronique rocket on a short sub-orbital flight.
From rats to cats
Hector was followed by Castor and Pollux in October of the same year (Hector and Castor survived; Pollux didn’t make it).
But the French team had bigger ambitions. They were looking for another small mammal to send into space, larger than a rat but small and light enough to travel in the narrow nose cone on the tip of a Véronique.
While rabbits or small dogs might have fit the bill, there was one important reason to choose cats: at the time, they were widely used in France for neurophysiological experiments, examining how the brain and nervous system worked.
“You could compare the data that you would get from a cat with data already existing from research done on the ground,” explains Dougherty, who co-wrote an academic paper on the mission in 2018.
There may also have been a less scientific reason, she speculates: “Cats are pretty good at hiding in small places.”
The nose cone was certainly cramped. It had to fit a restraint for the animal, instruments to measure and transmit data about its physical state, a cartridge to absorb the carbon dioxide it breathed out, transponders, beacons and a parachute.
Meanwhile the take-off and re-entry would be loud and turbulent, yet you couldn’t risk the test subject thrashing about and dislodging crucial equipment.
That meant France would need to undertake something almost as ambitious as mastering space flight: training a cat.
Feline flight school
In mid-1963 the French Aero-Medical Research Centre, Cerma, selected 14 cats for flight school: all females, purchased from a dealer and recommended for their calm temperament.
They were trained for around two months, practising sitting in a container for hours, being spun around in a centrifuge and putting up with blaring engine noise.
In early October, the cats who seemed to tolerate it best were taken to Algeria to prepare for a launch.
After several days of preparations, a petite black-and-white cat identified as C341 – Cerma was wary of naming the animals lest its researchers get too attached – was picked to become the world’s first cat in space.
Click on the video below to watch 1963 news footage showing France's space cat mission:
At around 8am on 18 October 1963, Cat C341 took off in the tip of a Véronique.
Electrodes surgically implanted on her skull measured her brain activity. Probes took her heart rate, a device attached to her leg sent a small electrical current to her muscles – to test her responses – and a microphone recorded the sounds she made.
The first minute or so was sheer acceleration – something like being shot up in a tin can, to go by Dougherty's description.
“The cat’s being pressed down, it’s being shook around, it’s got this loud roaring that it would be hearing through the walls of the nosecone,” she says.
But then the capsule reached zero gravity. The cat’s heart had raced and her breathing quickened during take-off, but at this point the data changed.
“She was obviously distressed by the shock of launch, but she did cope quite well with that weightless period,” Dougherty says.
“Admittedly it wasn’t a very long period, but she was seemingly quite content, the breathing was pretty good, they weren’t recording any mewing from her ... I don’t know that she would have been purring, but she doesn’t seem to have been overly upset during the actual period of weightlessness.”
Arcing upwards to 157 kilometres above the Earth, the nose cone separated as planned from the rest of the rocket.
Then it fell, faster and faster, pitching and rolling as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere. This was the phase the cat disliked most, to judge by her thumping heart.
The parachute opened and jerked the capsule to a slow downward drift. Ten and a half minutes later, the cat was back on the ground, only a couple of kilometres from where she’d left it.
Sacrificed to science
A helicopter swooped in to recover the nose cone and its passenger, who was shaken but alive.
“She’s fine, she’s doing perfectly well, she’s eating well – I think she’s quite alright,” the director of Cerma, Robert Grandpierre, told a television interviewer triumphantly.
But France’s space programme wasn’t done with her yet. The next two months were spent conducting tests. Had her brush with outer space affected her behaviour, her muscles, her nervous system?
Finally the researchers turned their attention to the cat’s brain. At the time, there was only one way to examine it.
“They put her down so that they could look at the areas of the brain, especially around where the electrodes were to see if they had caused any issues,” says Dougherty.
“As it turned out, apparently there weren’t any. So she probably could have gone on living happily for some time longer.”
She believes the sacrifice, though regrettable, was part and parcel of the experiment. “Unfortunately for her they did put her down and they probably didn’t need to. But again, it’s one of these things: at the time they didn’t know that until they did it.”
A tiny part of space history
Like Laika the dog and Ham the chimp, who the US had launched into space two years earlier, Cat 341 was briefly a space celebrity.
When the media learned about the flight, they nicknamed her “Felix”, like the cartoon. Cerma took up the name, though, since she was female, they made it Félicette.
But the space race soon moved on. Soviet and American rockets were already powerful enough to carry a human into space, as they each briefly had in the spring of 1961.
France, too, would quickly advance from Véroniques to higher-powered Vestas. After a second flight with a different cat ended in failure, Cerma gave up on felines altogether; by 1967, France was launching macaque monkeys into space.
All the feverish progress “overtook very quickly Félicette’s little experiment”, says Dougherty. “She never had a chance to really become famous at the time, except with space buffs.”
It was thanks to them – as well as a newfound fan who started a crowdfunding campaign – that, in 2019, Félicette got a memorial statue in the International Space University’s Pioneers Hall.
“Félicette’s story is a tiny little part of that quest to understand what it is that space does to the living organism,” observes Dougherty.
“The story’s had a little bit of a revival and I think now, coming up on that 60th anniversary, it is nice to give Félicette a little bit of the coverage that she didn’t get back in the day.”
Her next pet kitty, she tells RFI, will be named Félicette. “She’s still the only cat that’s been into space – and survived.”
Listen to a conversation about Félicette on episode 101 of RFI's Spotlight on France podcast.
