In 1963, France sent a Parisian stray cat 154 km into space, making Félicette the first and only cat to travel beyond Earth; decades later, a bronze statue was unveiled in her honor. Launched on October 18, 1963, aboard a French Véronique rocket, Félicette completed a short suborbital mission and returned safely to Earth by parachute. In 2020, her extraordinary place in space history was finally commemorated with a bronze statue at the International Space University in France.
Her historic journey lasted only a few minutes, but Félicette's story remains one of the most unusual chapters in the early history of space exploration.
