Félicette: the only cat to ever reach space — and she did it in 1963

In October 1963, a 2.5 kg black-and-white stray from Paris made a 13-minute trip no cat has repeated since.

Her name was Félicette. She rode a Véronique AGI 47 sounding rocket out of the Algerian Sahara, climbed to 152 kilometres above Earth, experienced 9.5g of force on ascent — roughly double what the Apollo astronauts would feel — spent about five minutes in weightlessness, and came back down under a parachute, alive.

France's space medicine program, CERMA, had started with 14 female strays, chosen for calm temperament. To monitor her physiological responses during flight, scientists surgically implanted 9 electrodes directly on Félicette's skull — covering the frontal sinus, somatic cortex, ventral hippocampus, reticular area, and association cortex — plus cardiac sensors on her legs. The data she transmitted back was high quality: during weightlessness, her heart rate slowed and her breathing normalized. During turbulent re-entry, her heart rate climbed again. Her brain stayed active and readable the whole way.

What the recording showed was that a cat could handle spaceflight. The neurological signals survived the trip intact.

Félicette was euthanized two months after landing so scientists could examine her brain directly. The autopsy, unfortunately, yielded little that the electrode data hadn't already captured.

She was officially unnamed for most of her training — catalogued as "C341," since the researchers deliberately avoided naming the animals to stay detached. The press initially called her "Felix" (after the cartoon cat), which CERMA corrected once her sex was confirmed. "Félicette" stuck.

For decades, she was largely forgotten — overshadowed by Laika the Soviet dog (1957) and Ham the American chimpanzee (1961). It took a 2017 crowdfunding campaign to commission a proper memorial: a 1.5-metre bronze statue of Félicette perched atop the globe, gazing upward, unveiled on December 18, 2019, at the International Space University in Strasbourg.

She remains the only cat to have reached space. No other cat has gone since.

If France had picked a different cat from those 14 strays that day — would we even know Félicette's name? What do you think should have happened differently in how she was treated?