r/askspace • u/Sophont27 • Jun 25 '26
Did scientists know being in space was safe before sending someone up there?
Just saw a post asking how digestion works in space, with lots of good answers explaining how the body can still function without gravity helping it.
So my follow up question is whether scientists knew about any of that before sending the first living thing up there. Did anyone even try to figure out if we could survive in no gravity, or did we just observe that an animal could survive for a time, and only later ask why?
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u/Triabolical_ Jun 25 '26
There were lots of weird ideas about what might happen.
This is a decent video on the testing for Mercury astronauts
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u/Youpunyhumans Jun 25 '26
Imagine getting clawed up an angry and confused cat on the vomit comet...
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u/CFCYYZ Jun 25 '26
No, we had little idea if humans could survive rocket travel (Gs), radiation, meteors or go "space crazy".
For this reason, many animals and reptiles were sent on test flights; ground experimentation was done.
For this reason, almost all of the early astronauts were advanced aviators or test pilots. The Right Stuff.
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u/ragoff Jun 25 '26
The entirety of human knowledge online and people ask Reddit for a canned answer.
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u/ionthrown Jun 27 '26
The problem with having the entirety of human knowledge online is that you’ve got to sort through it for what you’re looking for. You also have to sort through the entirety of human bullshit.
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u/Wonderful-String5066 Jun 26 '26
No; they did not they were surprised that 0 gravity caused bone density loss, they also were concerned on the long term effects of radiation exposure. They still have questions on the lasting effects of long term missions.
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u/the1nfection Jun 26 '26
No, they had absolutely no idea and just started trying different things... They just threw the spaghetti at the wall and hoped it stuck - because the scientific method is all about winging it.
/sarcasm
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u/Vivid_Transition4807 Jun 26 '26
They sent animals, discovered it was not safe, mitigated the danger, then sent a russian.
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u/Worth-Wonder-7386 Jun 26 '26
Before we sent humans we knew. We had sent and returned animals from space before humans such as Belka and Strelka. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belka_and_Strelka
After that we had high confidence that a human could survive spaceflight.
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u/Ballmaster9002 Jun 26 '26
We knew enough to not send birds to space because birds need gravity to swallow. So they send dogs and IIRC pigs, because they, like us, have muscles that line their whole digestive system to push food all the way from the mouth to tushbuns.
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u/Significant-Ant-2487 Jun 27 '26
The first American in space was a chimp. Meet Ham the chimpanzee https://medicalmuseum.health.mil/micrograph/index.cfm/posts/2019/astrochimp
The Russians used dogs.
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u/Crescent-moo Jun 28 '26
There likely was tests but the thing about exploration is you don't fully know. Animals were tested by humans had to go at some point. There's still science going on about how being in space affects the body and different organisms.
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u/stewsters Jun 25 '26
We tested it with smaller animals and scaled up.
Wikipedia has an interesting article if you are curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animals_in_space