In the fall of 1963, a cat named Félicette blasted off in a rocket headed for space, her brain and body hooked up  to a whole bunch of sensors.

Little did she know, she was headed where no human had been before: on a mission to reveal how the brain works in near zero-gravity. As far as early astronauts go, Félicette isn’t an especially famous one.

But in one 10-minute flight, she helped pave the way for  all of the human explorers who would follow. [intro jingle] The practice of sending living things to space was only about 16 years old when Felicette made her historic trip. U. S. scientists kicked things off in 1947 with a bunch of fruit flies.

Then in 1948, a rhesus monkey named Albert blasted off from New Mexico in the nose of a V-2 rocket. And in the coming years, the  U. S. and the Soviet Union sent dogs, rabbits, rats, and chimps all sailing past the stratosphere.

The point of sending up all these animal explorers was to get an idea how the human body might respond to space travel. The Space Race was in full swing, and the two countries were each scrambling to get humans into space before the other. So they had all sorts of questions about the effects of weightlessness, radiation exposure, and the breakneck acceleration that happens during launch and re-entry.

But they weren’t the only ones. France also wanted a piece of the space game, and they quickly became the third country to establish a space program. By 1959, French space scientists were fixated on understanding how weightlessness affects the body.

They were especially interested in seeing how it might affect brain signaling, breathing, and heart rate. They started out by launching  a few rats into space, but they really wanted to  take things a step further and run some tests on a bigger animal. So, they turned to cats — because neuroscientists already understood the cat nervous system really well, and they’d be able to suss out anything unusual.

In 1963, the French space  program picked up 14 female cats from a pet dealer and started  training them for space. Any cat they sent to space was going to need to handle the roaring engine, the spinning rocket, and the intense G-forces as calmly as possible. And they could only send up one cat at a time, so they were looking for the  chillest one of the bunch.

For two months, the researchers put each cat into a box for a couple hours a day, with launch sounds blasting through speakers. They also put the cats in a compression chamber and spun them in a centrifuge to mimic what they’d feel in an actual rocket. To be clear, this kind of research would not fly today, and for good reason!

But animal research ethics in the  1960s were a little different. So after putting each cat through this ordeal, the researchers graded each  one on its performance. But they didn’t choose a winner just yet.

A couple weeks ahead of the launch, the researchers put all the cats on a cargo plane headed to the launch site, deep in the Sahara Desert. Testing continued there, and finally, after one last round with  the eight best performers, a black-and-white cat named CC 341 rose to the top of her class, and the researchers picked her  to be the first feline astronaut. Of course, CC 341 was no name for the world’s first feline astronaut, so they eventually dubbed her Félicette.

Before the big day, they surgically implanted a bunch of electrodes inside Félicette’s brain that would measure her brain activity throughout the flight. They made sure to cover areas like the left associative cortex and the right hippocampus, which are tied to higher-level  reasoning in humans. You know, the kind of stuff that could be pretty important during a space flight.

Then after a bunch of intense rehearsals, researchers strapped Félicette inside the nose of the rocket and blasted her into space. The electrode data streamed  back to Earth in real time as Félicette’s rocket blazed through the sky. She stayed alert during liftoff, which is no surprise given how  noisy and dramatic the ride must have been and Her capsule  recorded forces of 9.5 Gs.

That’s almost 10 times the  force of gravity on Earth. But by the time Félicette  got close to zero-gravity, she was super-relaxed. She breathed slowly, and the researchers found few  variations in her activity.

Three-and-a-half minutes into her flight, her rocket reached its peak, at 157 kilometers above the ground. That’s when things got a little dicey. The capsule tossed and  turned, and during re-entry, Félicette had some minor heart trouble.

But as her capsule glided to a  landing 10 minutes after takeoff, Félicette was hanging in there, and she emerged from the flight totally healthy. Aside from the minor heart trouble, the one other odd thing scientists noticed was that Félicette had dozed off a few times, likely because of the sensory deprivation. But overall, the fact that she didn’t suffer from any major brain dysfunction was good news for space scientists!

Of course, they couldn’t be sure that human brains would respond the same way as a cat’s, but it was a promising first step. Sadly, space cats had a short legacy that both began and ended with Félicette. Six days after Félicette’s little jaunt, a rocket carrying a second cat  blew up shortly after liftoff, and Félicette’s successor died  before ever reaching space.

Soon after, the French acquired two larger rockets big enough to fit larger animals, so they moved on to using primate astronauts. As for Félicette, she ended up being euthanized months after her journey s o that researchers could study her brain. She never got the fame of some  of the other charismatic animals that went to space around her time.

But in 2017, a Kickstarter campaign raised funds to put up a statue of her at the International Space  University in Strasbourg. And Félicette deserves it! She helped us understand the risks and challenges that human astronauts would face when they made it to space a few years later.

We owe her some real credit for helping make their journeys safer. So to help celebrate Felicette, SciShow has made a limited edition pin of France’s feline astronaut. Which you can order right now by heading over to Complexly.store [ OUTRO MUSIC ]