At 8:09 in the morning on 18 October 1963, a rocket lifted off from a French test range in the Algerian Sahara carrying a small black and white cat from Paris. She had nine electrodes screwed into her skull, a number instead of a name, and about thirteen minutes to live through the strangest experience any domestic cat has ever had. She came back alive. She is still the only cat to have gone to space, and for most of the following fifty years the world could not even get her name right. This is the story of Félicette, the first cat in space, and of the messy, uncomfortable, genuinely remarkable French program that put her there.
What You Will Find Here
- The Cat Who Was Only a Number
- France Built a Spaceport in the Sahara
- What the First Cat in Space Went Through in Thirteen Minutes
- What Happened to the Other Thirteen Cats
- How the First Cat in Space Got Called Félix
- The Statue 1,141 Strangers Paid For
- Frequently Asked Questions
The Cat Who Was Only a Number
In 1963 the Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherches de Médecine Aéronautique, France’s aviation medicine research centre, bought fourteen cats from a Paris dealer. Accounts of the era describe ordinary street cats, nothing pedigreed, nothing special. The one that would eventually matter was a shorthaired tuxedo weighing around 2.5 kilograms. She was labelled C 341.
The numbering was deliberate. The researchers avoided giving the animals names, on the reasonable assumption that people who name a cat tend to become attached to it, and attachment was not useful in a program where most of the subjects were not going to survive the science. It is a small detail that tells you everything about the ethical temperature of animal spaceflight in the early sixties.
Why Every Candidate Was Female
All fourteen cats were female. The stated reason was temperament: the team judged females calmer and better suited to long stretches of confinement in a narrow capsule. Whether that generalisation holds up as biology is debatable, but it was the operating assumption, and it is the reason the first cat in space was a she. If you want the actual genetics of why female cats carry coat patterns male cats almost never do, we went through that in detail in our piece on calico and tortoiseshell coats.
The training ran roughly two months. The cats were spun in a high-G centrifuge, strapped into a three-axis chair while recordings of rocket noise played, sealed into containers that mimicked the flight capsule, and wrapped in restraint cloths until being immobilised stopped producing panic. Cats, as anyone who has tried to put one in a carrier knows, do not consent to this quickly.
Nine Electrodes in the Skull
The part people flinch at is the surgery. Every cat in the program had electrodes implanted permanently through the skull so that neural activity could be recorded during flight. Félicette carried nine of them, positioned to read from the frontal sinus, the somatic area, the ventral hippocampal region, the reticular area and the association cortex. Additional electrodes tracked cardiac activity and allowed the team to deliver stimulation in flight and watch how her nervous system responded under conditions nobody could reproduce on the ground.
That was the whole scientific point. France was not sending a cat up as a mascot. The mission was neurophysiology: what does a mammalian brain do during high acceleration, during five minutes of free fall, during a violent parachute snatch. A cat’s nervous system was compact, well mapped by the standards of the time, and small enough to fit in a sounding rocket nose cone.
France Built a Spaceport in the Sahara
The launch site was Hammaguir, in what is now Béchar Province, Algeria, southwest of the town of Béchar. France operated it as a rocket and missile test range from 1947 to 1967. Algeria became independent in 1962, and the postcolonial agreements let France keep using the range for a few more years, which is why a French cat was launched from Algerian sand a year after Algerian independence.
The rocket was a Véronique, a liquid-fuelled sounding rocket descended from German V-2 engineering and the first liquid-fuel research rocket built in Western Europe. Félicette flew on Véronique AGI 47. The same family of vehicles had already carried French biological payloads: on 22 February 1961 a rat named Hector reached an apogee of about 110 kilometres from Hammaguir and came back alive, making France the third nation to launch an animal into space and recover it.
Hammaguir also carried France into orbit. On 26 November 1965 a Diamant rocket launched the satellite Astérix from the same range, making France the third country to put a satellite in orbit on a vehicle of its own. Two years later the site was handed over and the French program moved on. The cat flight sits right in the middle of that arc, at the moment when France was proving it could do this without American or Soviet help.
What the First Cat in Space Went Through in Thirteen Minutes
C 341 was loaded into the nose cone and launched at 8:09 a.m. local time. The engine burned for 42 seconds. During the ascent she pulled about 9.5 g, meaning her body weighed roughly nine and a half times what it does sitting on a windowsill. Sensors relayed her heart rate, her breathing and her brain activity in real time, and a microphone in the capsule picked up the sound of her respiration.
The nose cone separated at around 7 g. Apogee was 152 kilometres, comfortably above the 100 kilometre Kármán line that is usually taken as the edge of space. Then came roughly five minutes of weightlessness, which for a cat is not an abstraction. Falling is a cat’s core competency; the vestibular system and the righting reflex exist precisely to solve the problem of a body in the air, and we broke down the physics of how cats twist mid-fall in a separate piece. In free fall none of that machinery has anything to push against. Whatever her brain did during those five minutes, it had never been asked to do it before.
Reentry brought another shock. Parachute deployment hit around 9 g. The capsule came down under canopy and a helicopter crew reached it about thirteen minutes after ignition. Félicette was alive and, by the team’s assessment, unharmed. The Guinness World Records entry for first cat in space is hers, and no other cat has ever contested it.
What Happened to the Other Thirteen Cats
Six days later, on 24 October 1963, France launched a second cat. That flight went wrong from the pad. An explosive bolt failure sent the rocket off at a bad angle, the transponder that should have located the capsule malfunctioned, and by the time the nose cone was found the animal inside had not survived. That cat has no name, no statue and no Guinness entry. It is the part of the story that gets left out of the cute version.
Of the original fourteen, two flew. One, nicknamed Scoubidou, had her electrodes removed and was kept on as a mascot rather than being put down. Most of the rest were euthanised so their brains could be examined. Fourteen cats went into the program. Reports agree that only a small handful came out of it alive.
Félicette Survived the Flight, Not the Study
About two months after the launch, Félicette was euthanised so that her brain could be dissected and the implanted electrode sites examined directly against the telemetry recorded in flight. That was the plan from the beginning; the flight data was only half the experiment, and the tissue was the other half.
It is worth sitting with that rather than skipping past it. The animal spaceflight programs of the fifties and sixties were built on the premise that a certain number of dogs, monkeys, rats and one cat would be spent to buy information that would keep human crews alive. Laika, launched by the Soviet Union on 3 November 1957, died in orbit and was never coming back by design. The first animals in space at all, fruit flies on a captured V-2 in February 1947, were parachuted home in a canister. Albert II, a rhesus monkey, reached space in 1949 and died on impact when his parachute failed. Belka and Strelka orbited and landed alive on 19 August 1960. Félicette belongs in that line, and the line is not a comfortable one.
How the First Cat in Space Got Called Félix
Here is where the historical record fell apart. Because the cats were kept anonymous during training, the press had no name to print when the flight succeeded. Reporters invented one: Félix, after the cartoon character. CERMA then adjusted the invented name into its feminine form, Félicette, and adopted that officially, since the cat was in fact female.
The correction never fully caught up with the error. For decades the story circulated as “Félix the space cat”, and a widespread version claimed Félicette had merely been a backup for a male cat named Félix who did the real flight. That male cat almost certainly never existed. The world remembered a fictional tomcat and forgot the actual animal.
The Stamps That Made It Worse
Three African postal administrations issued commemorative stamps honouring the flight: Comoros in 1992, Chad in 1997 and Niger in 1999. All of them labelled the cat Félix. Two of them dated the mission to 1 October 1963, which is off by seventeen days. The Niger stamp illustrates a longhaired cat, and Félicette was a shorthair. Three tributes, and between them they got the name, the date and the animal wrong. Collectors kept buying them, and the wrong version kept spreading. Cats have been misremembered by official iconography before, though usually more flatteringly, as with the temple cults we covered in cats in ancient Egypt.
The Statue 1,141 Strangers Paid For
The rescue of Félicette’s name came from outside the space industry entirely. Matthew Serge Guy, a creative director based in London, came across the story, noticed that the only cat ever flown to space had no memorial anywhere, and launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2017 to build one. By April 2018 it had raised around £40,000, roughly 57,000 US dollars, from 1,141 backers.
British sculptor Gill Parker produced a bronze about 1.5 metres tall showing Félicette sitting on top of a globe, head tilted upward. It was unveiled on 18 December 2019 at the International Space University in Strasbourg, during celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the university’s Master of Space Studies program. She is now permanently on a campus full of people training to send things into orbit, which is a better ending than a mislabelled stamp.
What the statue really corrects is an accounting error. Space history keeps a careful ledger of firsts, and for over half a century one entry in that ledger was filed under a name that belonged to a cartoon. Getting it right matters for the same reason it matters that the Voyager Golden Record lists what humanity actually chose to send outward, rather than what we would prefer to say we sent. The record should match what happened.
Frequently Asked Questions
Has any cat been to space since 1963?
No. Félicette is the only cat ever flown to space, and the second French cat launched on 24 October 1963 did not survive. No space agency has flown a cat since.
Did Félicette actually reach space?
Yes. Her flight peaked at 152 kilometres, above the 100 kilometre Kármán line generally used to mark the boundary of space. It was a suborbital hop rather than an orbit, in the same category as the early American Mercury-Redstone flights.
Was Félicette a stray?
She was bought in Paris from a dealer along with thirteen other female cats. Descriptions from the period point to an ordinary city cat rather than a pedigree animal, but “picked up off the street” is a romantic detail the documentation does not clearly support.
Why did they choose a cat instead of a dog or a monkey?
The experiment was neurological, and the feline nervous system was unusually well mapped in mid-century research, which made it a practical model for reading brain activity under acceleration and weightlessness. A cat is also small enough for a sounding rocket nose cone. If you are curious how differently that nervous system processes the world in ordinary conditions, see how cats actually see.
Where can I see the Félicette memorial?
At the International Space University campus in Strasbourg, France, where the bronze has stood since December 2019.
A Cat, a Rocket, and a Corrected Record
Félicette did not volunteer, did not understand, and did not get a long life out of it. She got thirteen minutes above the atmosphere, a set of readings that fed into what France learned about keeping nervous systems functional under launch loads, and then a scalpel. What she has now is a bronze statue on a campus in Strasbourg and a name spelled correctly, both funded by strangers who thought the ledger deserved fixing. For a cat who spent her whole flight as a four-digit code, being remembered accurately is the closest thing to a happy ending the story allows. Cats have been quietly shaping human history for a long time, from the streets of Istanbul onward, usually without being asked.
🐾 Visit the Pudgy Cat Shop for prints and cat-approved goodies, or find our illustrated books on Amazon.
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