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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to take a cat to a space station like they did in some Heinlein books.

One would think they'd learn to deal with weightlessness better if they had a few weeks to get used to it rather than a few minutes on a plane.

Don't know what you'd do for the litter box though.

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My plan is to go to Mars with the first domestic pet cat; it implies a level of civilization/comfort/safety (to be able to have pets) which is consistent with what I'd want myself. Maybe 10k people? 50k? Hopefully I live that long.

Shackleton's ill-fated antarctic expedition had a cat, so maybe not as much of a guarantee as you'd think...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs_Chippy?wprov=sfla1

Every major sea voyage of the past had a cat or two, they were necessary to keep rats from eating all the food supplies.

Apparently the cat on board the expedition that discovered New Zealand immediately upon reaching land jumped out and grabbed a small flightless bird (then a brand new species discovery) and dragged it on board to eat.

Cats have been a menace to the native kiwi birds ever since.

Ocean ships have rats so they would tend to have cats even if people didn't encourage them.

With the COTS technology of cat diapers I think they could have a pet cat on the ISS but they don't want the risk that it goes wrong and they'd have to put it down.

There's also the smell, by all accounts the ISS already smells a little bad from decades of BO and grime, I would not want to add the smell of cat shit to that.

do not worry, we will discard whole it soon...

The decommission date gets pushed back any time it gets close I doubt it will actually be considered until there's major structural issues. The time always seems to be "when we have a commercial alternative" which is economically a pretty long ways off from the looks of it.

I think the bigger problem is for a cat to survive g-force on launch

I doubt cats have a substantially harder time surviving g-forces than humans. Smaller animal should be less affected; plus, commercial manned launch g-forces are going to be pretty low peak anyway. Maybe 4G?

And loving pet owners will want to note it did not end well for the cat

Cats can be trained to sit on and use a human toilet seat. A space toilet with a vacuum would be more challenging but I bet a dedicated animal behaviorist with enough time and training could get a cat used to using a space toilet.

It may just be easier to design a zero G litter box. A screen bottom with a coarse granular material and sufficient airflow through the bed could work. No idea how a cat would dig in zero G though.

Sturdy screening to give claws a grip would probably serve as the equivalent of human handholds just generally. I don't know how comfortable or feasible walking on it would be, but I bet a cat could learn pretty quick to catch on to it and then push off along a desired vector, and they're already better at gyroscopic pointing than we are.

Not if it sounds anything like a terrestrial vacuum cleaner – cats do not get used to those.

However, Heinlein cats also walk through walls - not good when space is on the other side.

Pixel walks through walls because nobody explained that it can't be done, so I imagine the same would apply for breathing in and staying pressurized in a vacuum

Judging by how my cat can disappear and reappear at will all around my place... I wonder if household cats already have that ability.

Diapers, maybe, or the litter / pan would have to be under a constant slight suction? A big enough hamster wheel to give the cat gravity?

Someone's gonna have to answer this question in the next decade when rich space tourists want to bring their pets.

Heck, a space cat live stream could probably fund a significant part of a new station.

You can probably put a few mice in a centrifuge of 1 meter and they would be happy. Make the centrifuge 10 times larger, we can fit a litter box.

This sounds like a worthy experiment. Why don't we already have a mouse artificial gravity habitat on the ISS?

> Don't know what you'd do for the litter box though.

dear god... the image of a regular litter box in zero G made me wince. I had a cat years ago who was an excavator and make a big mess whenever she went on archeological digs.

Another thought, cats typically bolt from the litter box after pooping (one guy I have does an amazing 90 degree wall kick-walk ninja move to run downstairs.) Not happening in 0G :-)

> Don't know what you'd do for the litter box though.

pray

I thought about picking up the turds with gloves, wondered what I'd do about the urine, or what I'd do if the stools were loose and then I thought "are cat diapers a thing?" and it is available COTS

https://barkertime.com/designer-cat-diapers/

Has an animal without "grabbing appendages" ever been in space? What did it do?

Tadpoles have been:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14519690-700-space-fr...

Yep, from fruit flies, dogs, mice to fish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animals_in_space

Who says cats don't have grabbing appendages? Ever tried to deal with a frightened cat who wanted to put you between them and whatever they were scared of? Like if Velcro were made out of fish hooks - they can grab like a hot damn, and in my experience "damn" is the very least of what you'll say when they do.

More to the point, cats climb trees with their claws, so making ISS interior surfaces amenable to feline use is just a matter of finding a material that's enough like bark for them to get a grab, and durable enough to hold up under long use.

> Don't know what you'd do for the litter box though.

Cat diaper?

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