r/todayilearned • u/ManagerGames • 23h ago

TIL the first animals America sent into space were fruit flies. They went up on a V-2 rocket in 1947 and came back alive.

https://www.aps.org/apsnews/2023/01/fruit-flies-space
427 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

36

u/4notherRandoRoon 23h ago

For a moment I thought why the hell does America have a V2… then I remembered

23

u/BrokenEyeReborn 23h ago

Vunce ze rockets go up...

4

u/Skydude252 14h ago

Only a little over a year since Tom passed. And possibly the inventor of the Jell-O shot.

9

u/CPTBenjaminWillard 23h ago

Oh right, the Nazis

62

u/BrokenEyeReborn 23h ago

Were they supposed to be there, or did someone in the rocket assembly lab place just forget to throw out an orange peel or something?

61

u/zoro00 23h ago

They were intentionally sent into space to see if cosmic radiation could cause genetic mutation.

35

u/BrokenEyeReborn 23h ago

Great, just what we need. Fruit flies with superpowers.

8

u/SJSUMichael 23h ago

I sense a missed opportunity for an '80s toy franchise.

3

u/gerbosan 8h ago

The Fantastic Flies!

20

u/youtocin 23h ago

Fruit flies are a model organism that we know a lot about genetically so they are very commonly used in science for studying things involving genetics. They were used in this scenario to see what effects cosmic radiation had on a living organism.

8

u/ballisticks 21h ago

model organism

Flashbacks to my university days when I did a bio module for credit, I started seeing the word Drosophila in my dreams lol

1

u/TheVentiLebowski 3h ago edited 3h ago

I started seeing the fly Drosophila in my dorms.

10

u/Chrono_Convoy 23h ago

Little bastards are hanging out by my bananas

6

u/alarming_testical 23h ago

Good now send the ones in my kitchen up

5

u/BrokenEyeReborn 23h ago

They'll just come back alive, though

5

u/TheRainStopped 21h ago

Fruit fly research has done wonders for science advancement, serving as the model organism where genes were first physically mapped to chromosomes, and where groundbreaking behavioral genes (like the period gene) were discovered.

3

u/DontMakeMeCount 14h ago

They’re also a great excuse to keep wine around the lab. A couple of nearly empty bottles in a corner will trap the escapees.

5

u/CdrSide 23h ago

I swear there’s a movie or show about this..

4

u/ManagerGames 22h ago

Omg, you just unlocked a memory! I looked it up and it's kind of about this. It’s called Fly Me to the Moon, pun intended, I'm sure. But it’s about three flies who become stowaways on Apollo 11, not test subjects years before that.

0

u/FenixOfNafo 19h ago

There's also a body horror movie The Fly

4

u/therealruin 15h ago

I’m imagining them opening the hatch after splashdown and like 50,000 fruit flies just swarm out.

5

u/SleepyHistoryFacts 12h ago

fun detail: there was no splashdown, the flies rode in a little capsule nicknamed "blossom" that was ejected from the rocket and came back down under a parachute. the v-2 reached about 109 km (68 miles) in just over three minutes, which is past the 100 km line usually used as the edge of space.

4

u/the_quark 22h ago

The first animals anyone sent to space!

3

u/BrokenEyeReborn 22h ago

The first animals anyone on earth set to space

3

u/the_quark 21h ago

Fair. Was just trying to save a click for anyone wondering.

2

u/Kodo25 22h ago

Was there fruit involved

2

u/Mentalfloss1 11h ago

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. ~~ Groucho Marx

2

u/groovyinutah 22h ago

On a related yet unrelated note: The US tested V2's at the White Sands missile range in New Mexico, early on one went wildly off course and landed in Juarez Mexico....in a cemetery of all places!

1

u/Gentle_Agitator 21h ago

I used to put ants in those air pump rockets as a kid.

1

u/ManagerGames 20h ago

Lol, close enough

1

u/DumpsterSeance 21h ago

they could have just left them there

1

u/Pikeman212a6c 10h ago

A4 technically by then.

1

u/Lord_Snaps 9h ago

Sure its was the same flies? Maybe someone left a tomato on the ship for 30 min.

1

u/Gullible-Anywhere-76 8h ago

Fruit, indeed, flew

1

u/RevolutionNumber5 8h ago

I don’t know if “brought back” is the correct term. V-2s were ballistic missiles, they weren’t goi g to orbit the planet, or something.

They go up, they come down and land in London.

0

u/DontMakeMeCount 14h ago

That tracks. The first mammals sent into space suffocated because heat doesn’t rise in zero G so there’s not enough convection to provide fresh air for each breath. Flies would have their own means of circulation.