Before human beings ventured into space, a variety of animals preceded them - monkeys, chimpanzees, dogs and mice. Only the second satellite ever, Sputnik 2 on November 12, 1957, carried a dog named Laika. She lived in space for several days before being put to sleep. There were no provisions for recovering spacecraft so early in the space programme. Whereas the USSR favoured dogs in their 'animal astronaut' flights, the USA favoured primates - monkeys and chimpanzees. On December 12, 1958, a squirrel monkey named Old Reliable was launched from Cape Canaveral in the nose cone of a Jupiter rocket, but it was lost at sea. On May 28, 1959, monkeys Able and Baker were successfully recovered after a similar flight. 'Miss Baker' subsequently lived to a ripe old age at the Alabama Space and Rocket Center at Huntsville, Alabama.
On December 4, 1959, monkey Sam flew in a prototype Mercury capsule on a Little Joe booster from Wallops Flight Facility, off Virginia. In its 11-minute flight, it reached an altitude of 85 km. Miss Sam carried out a repeat mission on January 21, 1960. In the USSR, however, plans for manned space flight were far more advanced. By summer 1960 the Russians were ready to carry out orbital tests with animals in the Vostok spacecraft that the first cosmonauts would fly. And on August 19 they launched two dogs, Belka and Strelka, into orbit, using the powerful A-1 booster. Also aboard Sputnik 2 were two rats and 28 mice, along with insects, plants and seeds. After an 18-orbit flight lasting more than a day, the re-entry capsule was successfully recovered. The animal housing was ejected from the re-entry capsule as planned and parachuted safely to the ground. The animal crew were alive and well. It was the first successful 'live' recovery in space history.
A repeat flight by Sputnik 6 on December 1, however, did not go according to plan. The re-entry capsule, carrying dogs Pchelka and Mushka, plunged through the atmosphere at too steep an angle during re-entry.
It burned up like a meteor, and its crew were killed. In March of the next year, 1961, with speculation about a manned flight attempt mounting, the Russians launched two craft in quick succession, Sputnik 9 on March 9 and Sputnik 10 on March 25. They were both one-orbit flights, carrying a dummy cosmonaut and a dog (Chernushka and Zvedochka, respectively). And they were both successful. Sputnik 10 proved to be the final dress rehearsal for the first manned space flight by Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961. Meanwhile in the USA chimpanzee Ham had made a successful suborbital flight in a Mercury capsule on January 31, 1961. This led after further unmanned flights to the first US manned suborbital mission by Alan Shepard on May 5. Another chimpanzee, Enos, crewed the Mercury 5 flight into orbit, which preceded John Glenn's orbital flight, America's first, on February 20, 1962.
