- Quién
- No.18, No.12
- Qué
- first first
- Dónde
- Kazajistán (Baikonur Cosmodrome)
- Cuándo
On 31 August 1950, a V-2 was launched carrying an unanaesthetized mouse that was photographed in flight. It did not survive impact.
The first rats in space were a pair of white lab rats – called No.12 and No.18 – launched into orbit as part of the payload of the Soviet Korabl-Sputnik 2 mission (sometimes referred to as Sputnik 5 in Western sources). They were launched from the Tyuratam Missle Range (which would later become the Baikonur Cosmodrome) at 08:44:06 UTC (14:44:06 local time) on 19 August 1960 and returned to Earth, alive and well, at around 06:00:00 UTC (12:00:00 local time) on 20 August 1960.
This giant leap for rat-kind has been largely forgotten as the two white space-rats were overshadowed by this more charismatic fellow-passengers, the space-dogs Belka and Strelka. The purpose of the mission was to check for any possible health problems that might be caused by space travel and also to conduct a full rehearsal of the life support and re-entry systems that were to be used for the first manned spaceflight.
NASA had previously launched mice into space, and sent some rats into the upper atmosphere on high-altitude balloon flights, but generally preferred to use monkeys for its biological experiments.
