More animals have flown to space than human beings.
Many of them never made back alive.
Many of us have heard of Laika, the worlds first space dog.
But there were many before her.
Miss Baker, the celebrity space monkey.
Photo: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center
At the same time, experiments were being carried out on rockets.
On 20 February 1947, the US launched fruit flies aboard a captured German V-2 rocket.
The fruit flies were recovered alive.
Unfortunately, Albert II died during re-entry, when his parachute failed to open.
Numerous monkeys were flown into space during the 1950s and 60s.
Many of them were sedated to spare them the terror of being enclosed inside a cramped spacecraft.
About two-thirds of them didnt survive.
The Russians also launched animals into space, mostly dogs.
Before Yuri Gagarin made his historic flight on 12 April 1961, countless dogs were flown on sub-orbital flights.
Laika was one of them.
The original spacesuit that Laika wore into space.
They were strapped inside a tiny canister which was fitted in the nose cone of a Jupiter rocket.
They rose to 480 kilometers, survived 38gs and 9 minutes of weightlessness.
Miss Baker lived until 1984.
Space experiments with animals continued throughout the 60s.
This period saw a variety of animals get launched into space.
This included rabbits, chimpanzee, cats, wasps, beetles, frogs and tortoises.
The tortoises were the first animals to go around the moon, before men did.
Able (left) and Baker (right) strapped inside their tiny space capsules.
The first long-stay mission was attempted in June 1969, a month before the first moon landing.
He was taught how to feed himself food pellets from a dispenser.
He died the next day.
They also produce concentrated waste products.
Apollo 17 Command Module, on display at Space Center Houston.
Of the five animals, one probably died at the beginning of the mission for unknown reason.
Their 148-hour-stay remains the most time anybody spent in lunar orbit.
Once the mice returned to earth, they were whisked away to the operating room and dissected.
The autopsy found no significant damage to the mice brains, eye retinas or other organs.
By the 1970s, fishes and spiders joined the long list of animals to the moon.
In 1975, several tortoises spent a record 90 days in space on a Soyuz spacecraft.
In the 1980s, the first newts were spent to space.
Arabella, a common cross spider, spins web aboard the second Skylab mission in 1973.
When the stricken shuttles debris was analyzed, scientists found living Nematodes from an earlier experiment.
The indestructible cockroach first flew to space in 2006, launched by the private American firm Bigelow Aerospace.
The tardigrades made a miraculous survival.
Enos, the first chimpanzee to orbit the earth before his Mercury-Atlas 5 flight in 1961.
By the 21st century, organisms had long become routine in space missions.
