Last week I went to a puppet theater anthology which featured an excellent piece about the first mammal in space, Laika’s Coffin. It begins with a solo sung by Nikita Kruschev: “Put something / anything / put it / into space!” That’s no joke, it seems: I’m reading about the soviet mission Zond 5 which sent turtles around the moon and returned them safely to earth. Soviet turtles orbited the moon three months before the American humans Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders did the same. Turtles live a long time, and I want to meet those turtles.
(Incidentally, A few months ago I read the Steven Baxter book ‘Manifold: Time’ which features a bunch of genetically engineered squid which are launched into space and wind up colonizing and populating an asteroid. A reasonable idea, although the idea of sending an aquatic organism into space seems impractical, since water is so heavy. It’s a notable tribute to Baxter’s weird inability to convey internal emotions that the squid wind up the most sympathetic characters in the book.)