Written by John Strausbaugh, excellent book. Here is a great episode of many:
Putting dogs on top of rockets was nothing new. Since so little was known about the effects that rocket explosions could have on the human body and mind – acceleration, weightlessness, radiation effects, deceleration – the Soviets and the Americans have both been using different species of animals to test the conditions since the 1940s. The Americans began sending flies to their White Sands V-2s in 1947. An anesthetized monkey they named Albert II…climbed eighty-three miles in a V-2 in 1949. Unfortunately, his parachute failed to deploy and he crashed to the ground. The Americans continued to export primates in the 1940s and 1950s. Like two-thirds of them died. They also used many other species, perhaps the strangest of them all, black bears, which were strapped to a rocket-powered sled at a place with the deceptively sweet name Daisy Track to test the physical effects of acceleration and super-speed.
Recommended.
The post *The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned* appeared first on INCOMPLETE REVOLUTION.
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