SPACE: Three Black Mice

Three black mice named Moe, Sally and Amy were installed in a heavily shielded model of the U.S. man-in-space capsule last week, along with liberal rations of oxygen, oatmeal, peanuts and gelatin and a variety of scientific instruments. Then the capsule itself was placed in the nose cone of an Atlas missile at Cape Canaveral, and the missile lofted 650 miles into space and down the Atlantic toward Ascension Island at speeds reaching 18,000 m.p.h. During the ride, the mice rode into the perilous inner Van Allen radiation belt and were also treated to ten minutes of weightlessness; then they survived a blazing dive back through the earth’s atmosphere to a landing 5,000 miles downrange.

In the animal kingdom, Moe, Sally and Amy are junior to the U.S. monkeys Able and Baker, who survived a 1,700-mile space trip in May 1959, but they went farther.*Though they apparently took the trip without noticeable ill effects, scientists plan to study them carefully. Sally and Amy will be mated with Moe, and all three will be mated with other mice. This sort of thing may strike Sally, Amy and Moe as rather tame after all they have been through, but the genetic lessons learned from radiation effects will be valuable for human space travelers.

*And farther out than the Russians’ two dogs, Strelka and Belka, who orbited the earth in August and were recovered safely.