Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff Lauren bogelbam here. In the nineteen fifties and sixties, scientists around the world launched a veritable menagerie of creatures into space. The idea was to gauge the effects of space flight on living creatures in the hopes that humans
could follow. The Soviet Union sent a stray dog from Moscow named Leca into space, and subsequently the pooch was honored as a national hero, and Ham the chimpanzee was famously buried at the International Space Hall of Fame in New Mexico following his contributions to the U S Space program. And then there was France, which sent the first and so far only cat into space. She was in nobly forgotten until just a few years ago. So who was this hero cat? Felis Sette was one of fourteen cats
summoned to the French space program. Each cat had electrodes implanted into their brain and all were subjected to many of the same act it is included in human astronaut training. French scientists decided to use cats as they already had a lot of neurological data on them. At the conclusion
of training. Feli Sette, a petite tuxedo, got the green light in part because she had such a calm demeanor, and possibly because the other cats got too chubby during training, though Pheli Sette herself was a little bit of a loafy chunk. On October eighteenth of nineteen sixty three, Foli Sette, who was officially known as C three forty one, was strapped into a Vironic rocket and blasted from Algeria to nearly one hundred miles or one sixty kilometers above the Earth.
She experienced about five minutes of weightlessness, followed by the terror of a turbulent, spinning descent by a parachute. Just fifteen minutes later the flight was complete. Helicopter crew dashed to the landing site, threw open the cabin, and found Felisette alive and well. Two months later, scientists rewarded her heroism with ethan asia. They wanted to examine her body to observe the effects of space flight, and Feli Sette
was all but forgotten. France was the third nation to establish a civilian space agency, and like Feli Sette, is often regarded as an afterthought in the feverish space race between the US and the Soviet Union. So much an afterthought that in the nineteen nineties, when three former French colonies celebrated her story by issuing stamps with the cat's likeness, they mistakenly turned her into a hymn by using the wrong name Felix. But thanks to a clever Kickstarter campaign,
the story has finally been set straight. Londoner Matt Guy stumbled upon the tale of Feli Sette and was shocked that she wasn't already properly recognized for her accomplishments. Guy wrote on Kickstarter in she deserves a proper memorial. His online please netted around fifty seven thousand dollars, enough to fund a five foot tall bronze statue that's about one and a half meters. On December eighteenth of twenty nineteen, the statue was finally unveiled at the International Space University
in Strasbourg, France. Felis sets bronze Likeness hurches atop a small globe of the Earth, her keen kitty eyes fixed upward and outward, where she once soared higher than any cat in world history. Today's episode was written by Nathan Chandler and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more in this and lots of other curious topics, visit our home planet,
how stuff works dot com. And for more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,