Felicette – The Space Cat | Hacker News Reader

Felicette – The Space Cat

stuartatkinson.wordpress.com

67 pointsrbanffy12 comments

Her memorial statue:

https://www.space.com/felicette-first-cat-in-space-statue-un...

More at wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Félicette

She had electrodes implanted inside her brain, received electric shocks to her muscles, and endured 9.5 Gs on ascent. :(

She survived, but was put down two months after the flight so that they could analyze her brain.

Yeah... "What happens when we shock a cat in space" sounds more like a serial killer's idle daydream than legitimate science.

I'm gonna say they were assholes with that one.

If that's the statue the author is referring to with the phrase "a bronze statue of her was recently unveiled in Germany", I hope this didn't make it into the book, because Strasbourg was indeed part of Germany once, but is now French...

> Brazilian Army colonel Manuel dos Santos Lage planned to launch a cat named Flamengo aboard the Félix I rocket on 1 January 1959, but the flight was cancelled over ethical concerns regarding the use of a cat

Appropriate naming.

EDIT: Actually, this was probably deliberate mission naming, not the name of the actual rocket. Given the timing, it would presumably have been one of these or some relative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonda_(rocket)

We have a tuxedo cat that is named after her.

From the wikipedia page.

Félicette was euthanized two months after the launch so that scientists could perform a necropsy to examine her brain.[29]

Doesn't pay to be a hero.

What scientific hypothesis could they possibly be trying to confirm?

I read the story of how Einstein's brain was preserved and couldn't help but thinking this is pseudo science.

Presumably checking for damage. This was 1963, so about all that could be said of the safety of spaceflight, given that the USSR and US weren't really sharing data, was that Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn didn't immediately keel over dead.

Placing a cat in zero-gravity for a prolonged time is just cruel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_righting_reflex

Looks like they had a contingency plan[0]. I'd argue that the more-cruel action was euthanizing her when several other animals had already been dissected to see the impact of spaceflight on their bodies.

[0]https://stuartatkinson.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/feli3.jpg...

> Placing a cat in zero-gravity for a prolonged time is just cruel

Do we have evidence they wouldn’t be able to adapt?

Why did they send dogs and cats, coundn't pick a dumb animal like a chicken?

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