![]() ![]() The story of ZIB illustrates one rather pragmatic reason: Dogs were everywhere. ![]() But why did the Soviets use dogs, while the Americans used primates? The goal for the Cold War rivals was the same: to prove that animals could survive in orbit so that people could, too. “We take for granted now that animals and humans can function in space, but back then we knew absolutely nothing,” says Bill Britz, an American veterinarian who worked with the chimpanzees who flew to space in the early 1960s. Some physicians thought basic functions, like swallowing and pumping blood to the heart, would be impossible without the steady tug of gravity. No one knew how our bodies would react to weightlessness. Human beings had lived for all of history beneath the cosmic tarp we call an atmosphere, safe from the universe. On the other side of the world, the United States was carrying out similar biomedical research, only with primates, including monkeys and chimpanzees. The Soviet Union was developing a program to launch men into orbit, and dogs were their test subjects. This historic flight happened in September 1951. The mutt was placed inside a capsule, strapped to a rocket, and blasted to the edge of space. They plucked a stray dog off the street and named it ZIB, a Russian acronym that means “substitute for missing Bobik,” a common name for a small dog. The researchers at the Institute of Aviation Medicine in Moscow rushed to find a replacement. ![]() The cosmonaut hadn’t signed up for this at all. The training had been grueling and confusing. The cosmonaut ran away a day before his flight. ![]()
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