Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
Star witness: how the Royal Observatory transformed our understanding of astronomy and time
From the moment it was founded 350 years ago, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich drove our understanding of astronomy, navigation and time. Louise Devoy explores eight milestones in the history of this pioneering scientific institution
The big bang moment 1675: Charles II sparks a star-gazing revolution In the 17th century, the great maritime nations were vying to solve a puzzle that had confounded philosophers for many centuries: how to determine exact positions on the Earth’s surface. And in Britain, Charles II took a major step to ensure his realm’s position at the head of the pack. On 4 March 1675, the king signed a royal warrant appointing John Flamsteed as the first “astronomical observator”, tasked with “perfecting the art of navigation”. Flamsteed’s specific objective was to devise a method by which sailors could establish their longitude (east–west position) at sea – which involved measuring the positions of celestial bodies – and of knowing the time at a ship’s local position. And Flamsteed would get to carry out this vital research from the surroundings of the country’s first state-funded, purpose-built scientific institution: the Royal Observatory. It was urgent work, because England’s great rival, France, had stolen a march: Louis XIV had established an observatory in Paris nearly a decade earlier. Flamsteed was, in effect, playing catch-up. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/T809MT-CMYKWeb-Ready-7606aa3.jpg" width="2663" height="1775" alt="an illustration showing a large crowd looking at several artefacts including a globe, a map, and a satellite dish" title="King Louis XIV visits the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1671. The creation of an observatory in the French capital had left England playing catch-up (Image by Alamy)" /> The size of the task facing the astronomer clearly wasn’t lost on Charles II, for the king appointed none other than the celebrated architect Christopher Wren to design the observatory. Wren’s chosen site was the hilltop ruins of Greenwich Castle – and it was here that the foundation stone was laid on 10 August 1675. With its lofty windows, royal portraits and accurate pendulum clocks, the octagonal ‘star chamber’, completed in 1676, was grand in appearance. Unfortunately, it was also unsuitable for mapping the stars, as it was 13.5° askew from the meridian, an imaginary north-south line connecting the poles. So Wren designed another building nearby. This one would last for the remainder of Flamsteed’s tenure, before being demolished, rebuilt and extended as the Meridian Observatory. As for Flamsteed, he went on to conceive Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), by which he produced an average (‘mean’) 24-hour day that could be tracked using a mechanical clock year round. And that would have ramifications across the planet. Read more | A brief history of astronomy Dressed for success 1767: How a man in a padded suit transformed the art of navigation No one could accuse Nevil Maskelyne of not being dedicated to his job. In the dead of night across the mid-1760s, the fifth Astronomer Royal could be found staring up at the sky for hour upon hour, while straining his ears to hear the beats of a nearby clock. Dressed in an extravagant padded suit made from wool, silk and linen, Maskelyne was prepared for all that a British winter could throw at him. Not even perishing temperatures could stand in the way of the task in hand: to devise a ‘lunar distance method’ to calculate longitude at sea. This technique required mariners to measure the angular distance between the moon and a specific star, then compare it to Greenwich time. And they all used data gleaned from Maskelyne’s meticulous study of the movement of the stars. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/1767-L4962-001-CMYKWeb-Ready-30917ec.jpg" width="1709" height="1139" alt="Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne wore this wool, silk and linen suit to ward off the perishing cold while studying the stars (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" title="Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne wore this wool, silk and linen suit to ward off the perishing cold while studying the stars (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" /> This was, however, far from a one-man endeavour. Maskelyne was joined on his freezing vigils by his assistant, David Kinnebrook, and enlisted a network of mathematicians – dubbed ‘computers’ – to work remotely on calculating the predicted position of the moon over the year ahead. The Astronomer Royal even had a team of ‘comparers’ check the computers’ work (which paid off when two of them were found to be copying one another’s work). All this enabled Maskelyne to produce the Nautical Almanac, the first edition of which was made available on 6 January 1767. It quickly became an essential tool in navigation, reducing the time taken to make longitude calculations from hours to minutes. Updated annually, the Almanac became a required element of navigators’ training, and set the trend for mariners to calculate their position relative to Greenwich. High standards 1833: A curious metal sphere regulates clocks It can be seen from miles around – and with good reason. Sitting atop the Royal Observatory is a large red, metal ball that rises to the top of a mast at the same time every day, and drops a few minutes later. For those who haven’t set eyes on it before, it makes for a strange sight. But what is it there for? To answer that question, we need to rewind to 1764 when John Harrison, the celebrated English clockmaker, sent his fourth marine timekeeper, later known as ‘H4’, on a trial voyage to Barbados. The clock performed exceptionally well, losing a mere 39.2 seconds over 47 days at sea. To Harrison’s delight, it proved that such devices could provide mariners accurate reference times for calculating longitude. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/dreamstimexxl73355384-CMYKWeb-Ready-1ba1cb2.jpg" width="6567" height="4378" alt="A photograph of a large red brick building, with a domed roof on the right. There is a tower with a red ball on the top. Behind the building there is a purple and orange cloudy sunset" title="The time ball was installed on the turret of Flamsteed House at the Royal Observatory in 1833. It dropped at 1pm each day, enabling mariners to check their on-board chronometers (Image by Dreamstime)" /> Other clockmakers developed Harrison’s innovative ideas into a standard design that was cheaper and easier to reproduce. By the 1820s, the ‘marine chronometer’ was being used on both commercial and Royal Navy ships. But these chronometers only worked if they were telling the correct time when ships left port. That’s where the Greenwich ‘time ball’ came in. A time ball is a large spherical device that drops at a predetermined time of day, enabling mariners to set their clocks by it. The first modern example of this technology was erected in Portsmouth in 1829. Greenwich’s, however, would be the most famous. It was installed in 1833 on Flamsteed House, at the heart of the Observatory, providing maximum visibility from the Thames. Ever since, it has risen halfway up the mast at 12.55pm, climbed to the top at 12.58pm and then dropped at precisely 1pm GMT. Soon time balls were appearing at harbours and observatories around the globe, meaning that mariners could check their chronometers against accurate clocks, even during the longest of voyages. Timetable drama 1852: Greenwich rides to the railways' rescue Take a stroll down Corn Street in the heart of Bristol and you’ll come across a clock mounted to the wall of the city’s old corn exchange. There’s nothing unusual about that, you may think. But take a closer look and you’ll notice that this elegant 1820s timepiece has two hands for minutes: a red one for GMT and a black one for local Bristol time. The clock is a curious snapshot of a bygone age, and also a marker of a technological conundrum that the Royal Observatory played a central role in solving. The mid-19th century was very much the age of the railways – by the 1840s tracks were snaking across the country. This was all well and good. But when, in 1847, the railway companies decided to coordinate their timetables across Britain using GMT, they ran into a problem. Back then, Britain’s cities relied on local times set by sundials, varying by as much as 30 minutes between west and east. So how could the railway companies ensure that these times were perfectly aligned? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-170477153-CMYKWeb-Ready-b814769.jpg" width="2589" height="1726" alt="With its three hands, the clock on Bristol’s Corn Exchange offers a snapshot of an age when Britain’s cities relied on a variety of local times (Image by Getty Images)" title="With its three hands, the clock on Bristol’s Corn Exchange offers a snapshot of an age when Britain’s cities relied on a variety of local times (Image by Getty Images)" /> Enter George Biddell Airy, the seventh Astronomer Royal. Airy reasoned that a new technology – that of sending impulses via telegraph wires to a series of synchronised dials – could provide a solution. And so he ordered a new timepiece – the Shepherd Motor Clock – to be installed at the Royal Observatory. From 1852, the clock began sending daily time signals to railway stations across London and Kent, along with hourly signals to the Electric Telegraph Company on London’s Strand for national distribution. Train travel would never be the same again and, by 1880, GMT had been embraced as Britain’s legal Civil Time. Read more | Art, culture and science in the Restoration period A moment in the sun 1874: Greenwich leads the race to record the transit of Venus For astronomers everywhere, 9 December 1874 was like Christmas come early. Star gazers counted down the days to this landmark date, while George Biddell Airy ordered expeditions to Egypt, New Zealand and the Indian Ocean to observe the amazing event unfolding overhead. That event was a transit of Venus, a rare astronomical phenomenon in which the planet appears to cross the Sun as a slow-moving black dot. This was the first time that the transit had occurred since 1769, and the first such event since the invention of photography in the 1820s. Little wonder astronomers were excited. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/T4323-001-CMYKWeb-Ready-44133fe.jpg" width="5686" height="3790" alt="An observation hut is set up in Greenwich ahead of the transit of Venus in 1874. This astronomical phenomenon enabled star-gazers to accurately calculate the Sun-Earth distance (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" title="An observation hut is set up in Greenwich ahead of the transit of Venus in 1874. This astronomical phenomenon enabled star-gazers to accurately calculate the Sun-Earth distance (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" /> And their excitement was justified. By timing the transit’s key moments as seen from different locations on Earth, star gazers can measure the Sun–Earth distance, known as the ‘astronomical unit’. This yardstick (just under 93 million miles) is still used by scientists today. Ahead of the 1874 transit, Airy ordered special telescopes known as photoheliographs to project the Sun’s disc onto glass plates. However, his teams struggled with the kit, and the photoheliographs failed to capture the transit with any great accuracy. Despite those issues, the transit of Venus inspired a renewed interest in sun studies. Greenwich assistant EW Maunder started to compile a daily record of sunspot observations. In 1904, Maunder and his wife, Annie, assembled 30 years of sunspot data into the ‘butterfly diagram’ that still underpins our understanding of the Sun’s 11-year magnetic cycle. A degree of certainty 1884: The world aligns itself to Greenwich John Flamsteed had been dead for more than a century. Yet, on 13 October 1884, his great brainchild, Greenwich Mean Time, truly went global. On that day, delegates at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC voted in favour of making Greenwich the world’s prime meridian, or 0° longitude. The decision was influenced by a combination of technological supremacy and pragmatism. Greenwich was one of only four observatories with a suitably accurate telescope – the Airy Transit Circle Telescope – to define a meridian. And more than 70 per cent of shipping companies by tonnage already relied on the Greenwich meridian. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2YXWWWX-CMYKWeb-Ready-602ff19.jpg" width="3242" height="2161" alt="Delegates at the 1884 International Meridian Conference agreed to use the Greenwich meridian as 0° longitude (Image by Alamy)" title="Delegates at the 1884 International Meridian Conference agreed to use the Greenwich meridian as 0° longitude (Image by Alamy)" /> The delegates also agreed that the Universal Day – a 24-hour period to be used as a common reference to record events around the world – should begin at midnight GMT on the Greenwich meridian. This would hardly have come as a surprise: a year earlier, railroads in the US had already agreed to use standard time zones based on hourly meridians from Greenwich. The delegates assembled in the American capital that October day voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Universal Day, and countries started to define their own standard time zones as hourly intervals before or after Greenwich. The result was the familiar time-zone system we use today. Seeing double 1893: The Royal Observatory makes its biggest statement yet Was Greenwich under threat? The International Meridian Conference of 1884 might have confirmed the Royal Observatory’s primacy in the world of astronomy. But, within a year, the eighth Astronomer Royal, William Christie, was voicing his concerns that the principal telescope at Greenwich was being overtaken by newer, better instruments at rival observatories across Europe and North America. Determined to keep Greenwich out in front of the chasing pack, Christie persuaded the Admiralty to fund a new instrument, and that 28-inch diameter lens telescope – still the largest of its type in Britain – came into use in 1893. Most other telescopes at Greenwich were designed to be fixed into position to ensure the accurate measurement of the stars for timekeeping and navigation. The Great Equatorial Telescope – named after its mount, which kept the instrument moving parallel to the Earth’s equator – was part of a new generation designed for astrophotography. With a clockwork drive that kept the instrument moving in sync with the stars from east to west, it could be used to take photos with very long exposures stretching to several hours, capturing impressive views of faint gas clouds (nebulae). However, astronomers struggled to configure the heavy glass lens for photography, and so the telescope was reassigned to the study of double stars. By measuring the changing angle between an orbiting pair of stars, the astronomers could now calculate the mass of these distant suns. All that came to an end in 1971 when the Great Equatorial Telescope was finally retired. However, you can still see this extraordinary instrument – housed in its distinctive onion-shaped dome – at Greenwich today. Read more | A brief history of daylight saving time Pip pip hooray 1924: GMT is piped into homes across Britain If we want to know the time in 2025, all we have to do is check the phone in our pocket, or glance at the digital watch on our wrists. Across most of the 20th century, of course, that wasn’t an option. If Britons sought an accurate time-check that they could, quite literally, set their clocks and watches by, then they had to turn on their radios and listen out for the familiar strains of the ‘six pips’. The six pips first entered the public consciousness on 5 February 1924, when the ninth Astronomer Royal, Frank Dyson (below), announced a collaboration with the BBC. The Royal Observatory would start sending electrical impulses down a telephone wire to the newly created broadcaster. These would then be converted into a series of six audio alerts – or ‘pips’ – that would go out on the radio on the hour, every hour. But while some technologies were underscoring Greenwich’s enduring relevance, others were undermining it. In the 1930s, scientists developed clocks based on the natural vibration of quartz crystals; then, a decade later, the first atomic timekeepers began to appear. Both offered reliability and accuracy that the system of measuring time by the stars couldn’t match. This wasn’t the only threat to the Royal Observatory’s pre-eminence in the 20th century. As the march of industry impacted visibility across London’s skies, so Greenwich’s suitability for the practice of astrophysics declined. Soon it became clear that the Observatory would have to move. And it did so twice – first to East Sussex in 1957; then to Cambridge in 1990. Eight years later, it shut altogether. Time had finally caught up with the great old scientific institution. But its huge contribution to the fields of astronomy, timekeeping and navigation cannot be doubted – as the many thousands of people who visit the Royal Observatory museum that now occupies the famous Greenwich complex will no doubt testify. John Flamsteed would surely be proud. Dr Louise Devoy is senior curator at the Royal Observatory and author of Royal Observatory Greenwich: A History in Objects (October, 2025) This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Did our ancestors think the world was flat?
From Chinese cosmology to Victorian flat-earthers, James Hannam discusses humanity’s quest to determine the shape of our planet
When did people first figure out the world wasn’t flat? Well, according to author James Hannam, it was much earlier than you might imagine. James tells Jon Bauckham more about humanity’s quest to determine the shape of our planet – from ancient thinking and Chinese cosmology to Victorian flat-earthers. View Green Video on the source website
The history of the first moon landing: the road to Apollo 11
On 20 July 1969, the world watched in anticipation as Apollo 11’s ‘Eagle’ lunar module touched down on the moon’s surface. From the early Apollo 1 tragedy to the social pressures that threatened the 1969 moon landing, spaceflight historian Amy Shira Teitel traces the history and legacy of NASA’s early attempts to put man on the moon…
Apollo 11's moon landing was a prestigious international coup and a moment of global celebration – but the journey had been far from straightforward, coming at the end of a turbulent decade in American history… On 16 July 1969, at 9.32am local time, the five F-1 engines on Apollo 11’s Saturn V roared to life. Thousands of people spread along the coast of Merritt Island, Florida saw the fire and exhaust a fraction of a second before they heard the rumbling – many pulled over on highways and on beaches, while others looked out from their hotel balconies. Millions more people around the world saw the launch on TV. They watched as the rocket became a dot in the sky and disappeared, taking astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon for NASA’s first attempted manned lunar landing. For America, this day was nearly a decade in the making. Read more | Back on Planet Earth: what world did Neil Armstrong leave behind in 1969? When did moon landing attempts begin? When President John F Kennedy took office on 20 January 1961, he inherited a country locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union. But whatever worries the nation might have had about Soviet missile and satellite development, the incoming president tried to put minds at ease. The handsome 43-year-old gave America the impression that it was on the precipice of a golden age in which the government could solve the nation’s biggest problems. On 12 April 1961, the Soviet Union launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit around the Earth, proving that Soviet engineering was far more advanced than anything America possessed. Five days later, Kennedy suffered another embarrassment with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, when US-backed exiles made a disastrous attempt to overthrow the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Seeking redemption, the president looked to NASA for a way to save face. The agency’s recommendation was to land a man on the moon. A lunar landing wasn't something America could do right away; at the time NASA had only astronaut Alan Shepard’s suborbital Mercury mission under its belt, which had taken place on 5 May 1961. That 15-minute mission had afforded Shepard just five minutes of weightlessness, a far cry from going to the moon – but a moon landing wasn’t something the Soviets could do, either. A lunar landing was a sufficiently distant goal that levelled the playing field between the two nations and gave NASA engineers plenty of time to figure out how to get there. The result, if successful, would be a non-aggressive but definitive show of America’s technological superiority. Kennedy committed America to the moon landing on 25 May 1961, when he asked Congress to support a programme to be completed within the decade, in which he vowed NASA would land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth. What were the challenges to Kennedy's US space programme? The Cold War escalated in the wake of Kennedy’s lunar landing promise. After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy clashed with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in October 1962 after discovering the Soviets were setting up missile sites in Cuba. Kennedy announced a naval blockade of the island nation and the subsequent standoff lasted two weeks before the situation was resolved. The following year, Kennedy increased US involvement in Vietnam in an attempt to curb the spread of communism. The Cuban Missile Crisis: World on the Brink Member exclusive | In this HistoryExtra podcast series, we explore the roots of the Cold War standoff and meet the key players in the confrontation. We track the pivotal 13 days at its centre, and the Cold War alliances that saw diplomatic tensions escalate to breaking point Listen to all episodes now How did NASA plan to reach the moon? NASA, meanwhile, was wrapped up in the fundamental question of how to get to the moon. The most obvious way was to go straight there with a spacecraft that could land upright and would be ready to launch off the surface again for the return to Earth. This mission might have worked in science fiction, but in reality this spacecraft would be so heavy it would need an unfathomably large and expensive rocket called Nova to get it off the Earth in the first place. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/07/GettyImages-515029850-f695c84-e1708681815894.jpg" width="619" height="412" alt="US President John F Kennedy and Vice President Johnson in front of a rocket" title="President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson (right) visit the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. Kennedy's death in 1963 threw the nation into mourning, but it also saved Apollo, says Amy Shira Teitel. (Image by Bettmann/Getty Images)" /> A potential workaround was to launch the spacecraft in halves on two smaller Saturn rockets, but the risks of a failed launch or inability to connect (dock) the halves in orbit complicated the mission. A third method emerged known as the ‘lunar orbit rendezvous’. This left the heavy mothership in lunar orbit while a small, dedicated lander reached the surface. It was complicated, and astronauts would have to dock the spacecraft while in lunar orbit, but the mission was light enough to launch on a single Saturn rocket. NASA finally settled on the method of a lunar orbit rendezvous in July 1962. This decision made, NASA now had to figure out how to live and work in space. The Mercury programme [the US’s first human spaceflight programme] couldn’t do that; the spacecraft was too basic and didn’t have any hardware for docking, so NASA added an interim program to its Apollo planning called Gemini. Read more | Did NASA really pick the brains of the Tower of London armoury when designing the first space suits? The cost of research and development caused NASA’s budget to rise, and Kennedy became increasingly concerned that the amount of money he was spending on this moon mission would destroy his reputation. So, believe it or not, he tried to cancel the Apollo project. Before the 18th General Assembly of the United Nations on 20 September 1963, Kennedy called to replace Apollo with a joint US-Soviet mission to the moon that would foster peace and cooperation instead of competition. A month later, on 22 November, Kennedy was assassinated during a motorcade in Dallas. His death threw the nation into mourning, but it also saved Apollo: NASA couldn’t let the fallen president’s dream die. It helped, too, that Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, was a big space proponent. He threw his support behind the programme after taking office on the same day Kennedy was assassinated. Read more | What if JFK had lived? Not long into his presidency, Johnson introduced programmes that attempted to free the United States from poverty and racial injustice. Social programmes like Medicare and Medicaid; Head Start; and Job Corps sought to give Americans a “helping hand rather than a hand out”, but the cost of these programmes clashed with the commitment he’d inherited from Kennedy to stop the spread of communism in Asia. Before long, America entered a full-scale war against the communist Viet Cong, which forced a new wave of conscription in the United States, known as ‘the draft’. Civil rights was also becoming an increasingly volatile issue. In 1964, Johnson pushed a Civil Rights Act through Congress that prohibited discrimination based on race in public spaces, but that didn’t eliminate the racist strain present in large parts of the country, or offset the poverty of many black urban areas. NASA and the early lunar missions Against this backdrop, NASA operated in something of a vacuum, the agency remaining laser-focused on taking strides towards the moon. Between 1965 and 1966, NASA launched 10 manned Gemini missions that demonstrated all the functionality the agency would need on a lunar mission. This programme proved, firstly, that a spacesuit offered sufficient protection outside the spacecraft, which was necessary for walking on the moon’s surface; secondly, that fuel cells could power the spacecraft for the necessary two-week mission; thirdly, that astronauts could manoeuvre their spacecraft to a rendezvous and docking as they would do in lunar orbit; and, lastly, that the crew could survive in space for 14 days. Apollo hardware, meanwhile, was nearing flight readiness: the Saturn V that would launch the mission; the conical command module mothership; the cylindrical service module with all the crew’s consumables; and the bug-shaped lunar module that was custom-designed to support two men for a limited stay on the moon. As 1966 wound to a close, the agency was ready for its first manned Apollo mission. The tragedy of Apollo 1: what happened? Apollo 1 was intended to be a so-called “shakedown cruise”, a simple test of the command-service module in orbit before taking on more pointed objectives like a duration mission or a rendezvous test. But, tragically, it never got off the ground. During a routine pre-launch test on 27 January 1967, a fire broke out in the crew cabin where the environment was pure oxygen under pressure. The fire quickly became an inferno, and the crew of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee asphyxiated. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/07/GettyImages-3068129-3cb21fa-e1708682015316.jpg" width="619" height="405" alt="Astronauts Virgil 'Gus' Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee inside a practice module for the Apollo 1 mission" title="Virgil 'Gus' Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee inside a practice module for the Apollo 1 mission at Cape Kennedy, Florida. (Photo by MPI/Getty Images)" /> The subsequent investigation uncovered a host of technical and managerial problems plaguing Apollo. Issues and concerns with the spacecraft had been left unaddressed, owing to convoluted chains of command between NASA and the spacecraft's contractor, North American Aviation, and the sense of urgency causing all parties involved to rush, as shown by the accident report and testimonies in NASA’s archive. There was, however, a small silver lining: the fire had occurred on the launch pad, which meant that NASA could take it apart to understand the root cause. NASA used the lessons learned in the accident investigation to build not only a safer spacecraft, but a culture that put safety above all else. NASA was on the path to recovery as 1968 dawned, but America seemed divided like never before. Riots based on racial issues were common, as were anti-Vietnam War protests and feminist demonstrations calling for women’s rights. Both Martin Luther King Jr and Senator Bobby Kennedy were assassinated that year. Amid this national discord, NASA launched Apollo missions 4, 5, and 6 as tests of both rocket and spacecraft hardware. In October 1968, Apollo 7 marked NASA’s return to manned spaceflight with a simple orbital test of the command-service module. In December, it launched Apollo 8 to the moon with another command-service module, proving that the mothership was up to the lunar journey. The year 1969 opened with the final checks for the lunar landing; Apollo 9 tested the lunar module in Earth orbit and Apollo 10 did a full ‘dress rehearsal’ of the lunar landing. Now, all that was left to do was touch down on the moon’s surface. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/07/153101main_image_feature_620_ys_full-4a94e9c-e1708682081515.jpg" width="520" height="354" alt="A crowd watches the launch of Apollo 11" title="Former President Lyndon B Johnson and Vice President Spiro Agnew are among the spectators at the launch of Apollo 11, which lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969. (Image by NASA)" /> The launch of Apollo 11 Apollo 11 launched on 16 July 1969. For three days people followed updates of the crew’s progress via news bulletins and TV transmissions from translunar space. By the time Apollo 11 entered lunar orbit on 19 July after more than 75 hours in space, the real-life drama had captivated America. On 20 July, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin transferred into the lunar module christened ‘Eagle’ and separated from Mike Collins in the command-service module ‘Columbia’. They adjusted their orbit to pass lower over the moon's surface, then began their descent with Americans listening to the voice transmissions broadcast live on TV and radio. The world heard call alarms in the ‘Eagle’ – 1201 and 1202 programme alarms that forced the lunar module’s computer to reboot – and heard NASA give the crew a ‘GO’ for a continued descent. At 4.17pm Eastern Time, the ‘Eagle’ landed. Read more | Did NASA fake the Moon landing? The real history that debunks the conspiracy The world stopped and watched Neil Armstrong take man’s first step on the moon seven hours later. When he did, ($28 billion only 53 percent of Americans believed that the programme had been worth the cost, a staggering $25 billion USD. What's the legacy of Apollo 11 Six missions flew to the moon after Apollo 11, all of them successful landings that emphasised science and exploration (with the infamous exception of Apollo 13 – an explosion on board forced it to circle the moon without landing). Apollo 12 made a pinpoint landing to recover hardware from the Surveyor 3 probe that had landed three years earlier. Apollo 14 explored the more geologically-diverse ‘Fra Mauro’ formation on the moon’s surface, rich in samples from an impact event. Apollos 15, 16, and 17 added a lunar rover to the mission, thereby extending the ground that astronauts could cover in a single moonwalk. These missions explored mountain regions, highlands, and valleys on the moon, adding diversity to the collected samples. And each of these missions left instruments on the moon’s surface to measure seismic events and solar wind, among other things. All told, the six landing missions brought back 842 pounds of rocks and other samples and a wealth of data that scientists continue to use to this day. Read more | Back down to Earth: the legacy of the 1969 moon landing NASA’s plan was to build on Apollo’s success with the Apollo Applications Program (AAP). This would have seen longer lunar missions and even potential manned missions to Mars and Venus. But in the early 1970s, with President Richard Nixon newly in office, America was even less interested in funding space science. Apollo was cut short – Apollos 18, 19, and 20 were cancelled – and the AAP was canned in favour of the shuttle programme, which was designed to make spaceflight routine and ultimately more cost-effective. From our modern perspective, it’s easy to romanticise Apollo 11 and the whole lunar landing programme as a peaceful one done for the sake of exploration and human ingenuity. In reality, going to the moon was an offshoot of the Cold war, with Apollo 11’s landing a moment of success at the end of a difficult decade. Amy Shira Teitel is a spaceflight historian, author, YouTuber, and popular space personality. She holds a Bachelor's degree with combined honours in History of Science and Technology Studies and a Master's in Science and Technology Studies. This article was first published in 2019 Read next | From ‘moon-germs’ to motion sickness: health and safety on NASA’s 1969 lunar landing mission
Astronaut Tim Peake charts the history of humanity in space, from Yuri Gagarin's record-setting venture in 1961 to the 1969 moon landing and beyond
In the whole of human history, only more than 600 people have left Earth. Speaking to Emily Briffett, European Space Agency astronaut Tim Peake chronicles the human experience of space exploration over the last sixty years, from our first forays to the modern day – sharing some of his own experiences of spaceflight along the way. Tim Peake is the author of Space: The Human Story (Century, 2023) View Green Video on the source website
In the whole of human history, only more than 600 people have left Earth. Speaking to Emily Briffett, European Space Agency astronaut Tim Peake chronicles the human experience of space exploration over the last sixty years, from our first forays to the modern day – sharing some of his own experiences of spaceflight along the way. Tim Peake is the author of Space: The Human Story (Century, 2023) Watch a video version of Tim Peake on the human history of space Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon <a href="https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?id=489797&clickref=historyextra-253729&awinmid=3787&p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fspace%2Ftim-peake%2F9781529913507%23%3A%7E%3Atext%3DSpace%253A%2520The%2520Human%2520Story%2520reveals%2520all.%26text%3Dwider%2520audience%2520too-%2CFrom%2520the%2520first%2520moon%2520walk%2520to%2520the%2520future%2520of%2520space%2Clight%2520on%2520what%27s%2520coming%2520next.#:~:text=Space%3A%20The%20Human%20Story%20reveals%20all.&text=wider%20audience%20too-,From%20the%20first%20moon%20walk%20to%20the%20future%20of%20space,light%20on%20what's%20coming%20next." rel="sponsored" target="_blank">Buy now on Waterstones
Astronomy history: everything you wanted to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
James Hannam responds to your questions on humanity's enduring fascination with celestial objects
When was it established that the Earth is round? Did the Catholic church help or hinder the practice of astronomy? And how transformative was the big bang theory? Speaking to Spencer Mizen, James Hannam answers your queries on the long history of the study of the heavens. James Hannam is the author of The Globe: How the Earth Became Round (Reaktion Books, 2023) Watch a video version of Astronomy history: everything you wanted to know Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
“Nasa has finally been dragged back into the UFO debate”: David Clarke on the history of flying saucers
When Nasa held a press conference recently detailing its research into sightings of unidentified flying objects – UFOs – headlines proliferated once again about the possibility of extra-terrestrial visitors. But, as David Clarke explains, stories like this are nothing new
In May 2023, Nasa made public comments on UFO sightings revealing that the Pentagon’s UAP [unexplained anomalous phenomenon] Taskforce is currently investigating hundreds of unexplained sightings reported by military personnel. Back in 2017, a New York Times story claimed that a secret Pentagon-funded project had been looking at reports of UFOs by US Navy pilots and military sources since at least 2007. The official US government line has always been that the Air Force Project Blue Book, which ran from 1947 to 1969, was the last government-funded investigation of odd things in the sky, and that a report from the University of Colorado concluded there was no scientific interest or defence threat. On the podcast | How the idea of extra-terrestrials in flying saucers developed from its Cold War origins into a modern myth Since then, Nasa’s position has been that it isn’t interested in UFOs, so the 2017 story was a big surprise. Nasa has always been very reluctant to discuss the subject of UFOs. That was clear even back in the 1970s, when the US secretary of defense asked the space agency to consider reopening an investigation – long after Project Blue Book had closed – because the then president, Jimmy Carter, reported having seen a UFO [in Georgia in 1969]. Now Nasa has finally been dragged back into the UFO debate – and, as was the case in the 70s, it’s because of a groundswell of public and media fascination about the subject. Keep your eyes on the sky People seeing odd things in the sky is nothing new. If you look at any British newspaper published just before the outbreak of the First World War, for instance, you will find people claiming that they had seen strange lights in the sky, beams of light coming down to the ground, and elongated objects moving around that they were convinced were German Zeppelins sent to spy on the British Isles. People were anxious: they knew there was a war coming and they’d been told that the Germans would be sending airships to drop bombs on the nation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/07/2JD676Rwebready-9900c47.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Staff of the US Air Force Project Blue Book, pictured c1955. A university report on its findings concluded that it had produced no evidence of scientific interest, or to indicate a threat to national defence (Photo by Chroma Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Staff of the US Air Force Project Blue Book, pictured c1955. A university report on its findings concluded that it had produced no evidence of scientific interest, or to indicate a threat to national defence (Photo by Chroma Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Resurgences in UFO sightings tell us something about the period in which they were made. There’s a clear correlation between numbers and types of reports and the release of films and TV shows about UFOs. It’s a crude metric – you can’t say it’s cause and effect – and today there’s a continual drip-drip effect, so it’d now be hard to make any correlation. But it’s definitely the case that around the 1977 release of the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the number of annually reported sightings logged by the UK Ministry of Defence soared from a few hundred to a record-breaking 750, the highest total on record at that time. And people react to other prompts, too: whether it’s a story in a local newspaper or a Nasa public statement, those kinds of things cause people to look up at the sky rather than at their feet, and to report memories of things they ‘saw’ years ago. What aliens look like Our idea of what aliens look like has changed markedly over time. At the end of the 19th century, even before HG Wells published The War of the Worlds, he wrote a short story called The Man of the Year Million, satirising far-future prediction-making and describing what we might look like in the distant future. It claimed we would have tiny bodies, massive heads and huge eyes – and, interestingly, that’s how people now often describe aliens. It’s also how they are depicted in Close Encounters and in Whitley Strieber’s hugely influential 1987 alien-abduction autobiography Communion: A True Story. It’s now burned into our minds and into pop culture. But between the 1940s and 1960s there were a range of other ideas, too. George Adamski was one of the first of a string of people to become famous in the 1950s for his stories of being contacted by aliens. He described being met in the California desert by tall angelic creatures with long blonde hair and ski suits who came from Venus and Mars. People in South America, meanwhile, claim to have seen creatures coming out of flying saucers who were covered in hair and had bright red eyes. Flying saucers and folklore Our ideas about UFOs have also shifted across the decades. The idea that UFOs were saucer-shaped is partly derived from a claimed 1947 sighting by US aviator and businessman Kenneth Arnold, which came to define our modern idea of UFOs. But it’s not a straightforward story, because what he actually described seeing, while he was out flying over Washington state looking for a crashed aircraft, was a formation of batwing shaped objects. The media of the time interpreted that as looking like saucers – and, for many decades afterwards, ‘flying saucers’ were indeed that shape. Recent headlines may suggest that we are on the cusp of a new discovery – but history shows we’ve been here many times before. These stories have come up over and over again, and that’s precisely how folklore is created – by people’s experiences needing to find an outlet, particularly at times when they’re feeling stressed or anxious about concerns such as pandemics or nuclear war. It’s a reassuring idea that, somewhere out there in the universe, there’s a superior civilisation that has survived these problems and has now come to help us. These stories also suggest that the nasty government knows all about this and is hiding it from us – and if only we put enough pressure on them, they will finally admit that the truth is out there. But history shows us that there has never been a single subject that all the governments of the world agree on – so the idea that all the nations have got together and agreed to conceal this truth from us doesn’t make any sense. This article was first published in the August 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Did NASA fake the Moon landing? The real history that debunks the conspiracy
Was Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for man” made not on the surface of the Moon, but on a secret, earth-bound set? In the fifth episode of our podcast series Conspiracy, Rob Attar speaks to Francis French about the claims that NASA duped the entire world – perhaps even with the help of the US’s Cold War rival – and why the conspiracy theory needs to be blasted into space
It is perhaps the most iconic moment of the 20th century, watched at the time by an estimated 650m people around the world and ubiquitous for every generation since. On 20 July 1969, Eagle, the lunar module of the Apollo 11 mission, landed on the Moon, and American astronaut Neil Armstrong took “one giant leap for mankind”. After nearly 22 hours on the surface, Armstrong and compatriot Buzz Aldrin took off again and reunited with their crewmate, Michael Collins, in the command module Columbia, before returning safely to Earth. By doing so, they were hailed as not just American heroes – with the Moon landing marking the United States as victors in the Space Race, which had gripped the world throughout the Cold War – but as ambassadors of humanity. Read more | The history of the moon landing: everything you need to know The efforts of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) in accomplishing the feat were regarded as a technological, intellectual, political, and cultural phenomenon. Over the next few years, there would be six further Apollo missions to land on the Moon, ending with Apollo 17 in December 1972; humans have not yet gone back. Conspiracy: A HistoryExtra podcast series Member exclusive | Was the moon landing faked? Did Shakespeare actually write his plays? Were the pyramids built by aliens? Expert historians offer their perspectives on history's biggest conspiracy theories. Listen to all episodes now Did Nasa fake the moon landing? What is the conspiracy theory? Some conspiracy theorists would have it that NASA and the US government faked the whole thing. They were, so the idea goes, spurred by desperation to beat the Soviet Union in the Space Race and fulfil US President John F Kennedy’s promise made in a 1961 speech to land on the Moon “before this decade is out”. Such theories hold that Apollo 11 never reached the Moon, and the footage of Armstrong and Aldrin on the lunar surface was actually filmed on an earth-bound set. According to one claim, the renowned filmmaker Stanley Kubrick (famous for his sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey) was even involved. Prop rocks, suspicious shadows, and the lack of stars visible on camera are just some of the apparent clues to the Moon landings being faked. On the podcast | Francis French looks at why people continue to doubt NASA’s finest hour What is the source of the Moon landing conspiracy theory? “There were some people who started talking about it even as the Moon landing was happening,” says Francis French, author and journalist specialising in the history of space flight. “But the theory really gained speed in the early to mid-1970s.” The idea, French admits, does have some sense to it: amid Cold War tensions, but also secrets, espionage and deception, the US had utterly committed itself to the goal of putting a man on the Moon. Failure would have been deeply humiliating and a sign of national decline at a time when the two superpowers were vying for influence in other countries wavering between capitalism and communism. The US needed to succeed, which was why there was such a concerted national will in the 1960s, spanning numerous presidents and costing huge sums of money. Why do people believe the Moon landing was a conspiracy? In the 1970s, public trust in the US government and in the institutions of the country was being eroded. The Vietnam War showed that official reports did not necessarily match the photographs and films (as well as the tens of thousands of body bags) coming from the frontline, while the Watergate scandal eventually brought down the administration of President Richard Nixon. French looks to the remarkable achievement of the Moon landing itself as helping the theory grow. “I think one of the reasons that people want to think it was a hoax is because it was so amazing. It’s almost a compliment to NASA that people cannot believe it was possible, given that before 1957 nothing had been put in space at all. How is it that 12 years after the first satellite [Sputnik 1, launched on 4 October 1957], humans were walking on the surface of the Moon?” Then, after all that, NASA suddenly stopped going to the Moon in 1972. This has been seen not as evidence of a decline in funds and public interest in space flight, but as suspicious. Throughout the decades, scrutiny of the footage of the Apollo missions has put forward the most minute details and speculations as proof of camera trickery, while films like Capricorn One (1978), about a faked Mars landing, fuelled the imagination of the conspiracy theorists. The evidence that debunks the Moon landing conspiracy theory “The possibility of a Moon landing hoax is zero,” states French, as there was no way that such a colossal secret could have been kept. Hundreds of thousands of people worked on the Apollo programme and yet after half a century there has been no credible evidence from former NASA employees of anything being faked. “We know that from the conspiracies that have been proven to be true, this stuff leaks out very quickly.” All the claims made about the footage can readily be explained or debunked: the lack of stars, for example, is simply a result of the brightly lit foreground washing out the detail of the background. There are things that happen in the footage, meanwhile, that would have been impossible to fake using 1960s technology, such as the dust being kicked up by astronauts’ feet or the lunar rovers, or when Apollo 15 commander David Scott dropped a hammer and feather at the same time and they fell at the same rate. More from us Explore more conspiracies from history Did Hitler escape from his bunker and live in Argentina after WW2? Were the pyramids built by aliens? “Did someone else write the plays of William Shakespeare? Did Anastasia survive the massacre of the Romanovs? In 2009, an uncrewed spacecraft called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mapped the surface of the Moon, taking photographs of the landing sites of the Apollo missions: footprints, flags, tracks left by the rovers, were all still visible. As French puts it: “There are trails made clearly by people. Mirrors were left on the Moon to ping lasers from Earth, which still work, and rocks were brought back, which have been studied by scientists all over the world.” A major thing to note, says French, “is that the Russians were America’s sworn Cold War enemies. They had the ability to track any spacecraft going to the Moon. They could read the same signals coming back as the US and other radio dishes around the world could.” “They saw things go to the Moon, land, and come back,” he adds. “Clearly something was going to the Moon, and it would have been harder to fake a landing under automated circumstances than it would have been with people in. “If you’re into that kind of conspiracy theory where the Russians were in on it, at the height of the Cold War, then we’re in territory that I don’t think any rational person can really stomach.” What’s more, if embarrassment and humiliations made for a plausible reason to fake the Moon landing, that would have been nothing compared to the embarrassment and humiliation of being caught doing so. And the sheer scope of the conspiracy to pull it off leaves an unshakeable conclusion: it was easier to go to the Moon than it would have been to fake going to the Moon. Francis French is an author and historian specialising in space flight
In our new series delving into historical conspiracy theories, Francis French looks at why people continue to doubt NASA’s finest hour
In the fifth episode of our new series on history’s most well-known conspiracy theories, we revisit a defining moment of the 20th century that many people believe never happened at all. Rob Attar is joined by space flight historian Francis French to examine why people doubt NASA’s greatest triumph and how this conspiracy theory ties in to the paranoia of the Cold War era. Was the moon landing faked? Did Shakespeare actually pen his works? And did aliens build the pyramids? Find out more in our conspiracies series
Animals in space: the creatures who paved the way for human travel beyond Earth
During the space race, animals paved the way for humans to travel beyond Earth. Stephen Walker shines a light on these largely forgotten creatures and their often fatal journeys
Within hours of launch, Laika was the most famous dog in history. A mongrel – a dash of husky, a smattering of terrier – and by all accounts a lovable, sweet-tempered animal, she was now travelling in space about 1,000 miles above the surface of the planet. The date was 3 November 1957, the location of her launch a secret missile site in Soviet Kazakhstan, and her rocket a converted nuclear missile – the biggest in the world. It needed to be big, because Laika’s mission was to do something no other organism had achieved in the 3.5 billion years since life began: to orbit the Earth, circling it approximately every 90 minutes at 10 times the speed of a rifle bullet. Laika wasn’t coming back: the technology didn’t yet exist to bring her home. Nobody doubted that the Soviets had scored a stunning success at the very height of the Cold War, but her grisly fate also earned them the condemnation of animal-lovers in the west. As she circled the planet, strapped and sealed in her tiny, windowless capsule with just seven days’ supply of food and oxygen, the National Canine Defence League in the UK called for a daily minute’s silence, and dog-lovers picketed the UN in New York. What the protesters didn’t know was that Laika was already dead: her capsule had overheated just a few hours after launch. The Soviets would hide that truth for decades. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/04/GettyImages-3068737-e8b3253-e1649326879604.jpg" width="1024" height="754" alt="Monkeys – including a rhesus monkey named Sam, pictured – were secured in rigid cradles to restrict their movements during experimental US space flights" title="Monkeys – including a rhesus monkey named Sam, pictured – were secured in rigid cradles to restrict their movements during experimental US space flights; this example is from 1959. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)" /> Today, more than 60 years later, Laika is the one space animal most people remember. The astonishing reality, though, is that thousands of animals have been used – and continue to be used – in space experiments. The variety of species involved is simply staggering, ranging from dogs, monkeys and chimpanzees to tortoises, rabbits, cats, frogs, bees, spiders, fish, mice, ants, crickets, moths, snails, jellyfish and – inevitably – guinea pigs. Colossal speeds Although Laika was the first animal to make it into orbit, many preceded her on rocket rides to the heavens. The Americans did it first as early as 1948 in a programme called Project Albert, in which a series of rhesus monkeys – all called Albert – were inserted into the nose cones of reconstructed German V2 missiles in New Mexico and fired at colossal speeds to the edge of space The chances of survival were essentially nil, as everyone involved knew. On the first Albert flight, someone scrawled on the nose cone: “Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well.”Minutes later he was dead after his parachute shredded and he slammed into the ground. Five further Alberts were also launched. All five died. It was effectively a killing operation. So why was it done? To the scientists involved, the reasons were clear, urgent and morally justified. The US was waging war against the communists. If space was the next new frontier – battleground, even – it was vital to know what would happen to humans in that most hostile of environments. On the podcast | Stephen Walker tells Rhiannon Davies about the history of animals in space, from fruit flies and monkeys to Laika the Soviet space dog The list of unknowns was frighteningly long. Possible health risks included heart failure, blindness, brain damage and muscle paralysis, not to mention horrific cancers from solar radiation. There were fears, too, about what the terrific acceleration forces of a rocket launch could do to a human body, perhaps crushing it altogether. Nobody had a clue. So animals were sent up to find out. The Americans preferred using monkeys – and, later, chimpanzees – on the grounds that these were close biological cousins to humans. Yet it appears that nobody stopped to consider that, if they looked like us, perhaps they might feel like us, too. Photographs of the primates before their flights are deeply distressing, their vulnerability emphasised by the cylinders in which they are rigidly encased, their tightly restrained heads peeping out from a tangle of wires. After one 1959 flight in which two monkeys named Able and Miss Baker were fired on a ballistic, up-and-down trajectory into space and back, a reporter asked Captain Ashton Graybiel of the US Navy’s Aerospace Medical Institute how these animals behaved during training. “These monkeys are almost volunteers,” he replied. “We didn’t force a monkey to take a test if it objected to it.” About 50 such “volunteers” also populated Nasa’s chimpanzee colony at the Holloman Aeromedical Laboratory in New Mexico, with names such as Elvis, Little Jim, Duane and Enos. Their handler, medical technician Edward Dittmer, began their “conditioning” by tying them into chairs 1.5 metres apart to stop them playing with each other. He also trained the chimpanzees to operate a machine called a psychomotor, pulling levers in response to light cues. If they performed a task incorrectly they received an electric shock on their feet. The psychomotor would accompany them on space flights. A young male subsequently named Ham was the first to fly. In January 1961, with the race to put the first human into space accelerating towards its climax, he blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on a decisive test flight. To reassure the public, Nasa’s press release stressed that “only animals that are lawfully acquired shall be used and their use shall in every case be in compliance with the law” – omitting to mention that Ham had been kidnapped as an infant from his mother in Africa by animal trappers, before being sold to Nasa for $457. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/04/GettyImages-1277575688-640c906-e1649326724589.jpg" width="1024" height="740" alt="The first “astrochimp” is pictured before launch in January 1961" title="The first “astrochimp” is pictured before launch in January 1961. Designated “Subject 65”, he was named Ham once the mission had proved successful and the risk of bad press was over/ (Photo by: Marka/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> Ham’s flight was presented as a sensational success but it was riddled with technical problems, and he nearly drowned when his capsule began to sink in the Atlantic after landing more than 100 miles off course. At least he got an apple for his efforts. A photograph of Ham and that apple was an instant media hit – here was the world’s first “chimponaut” or “astrochimp”! – and, unlike for Laika, there were no large-scale protests. Perhaps dogs were just cuter – or perhaps, at the height of the Cold War, excuses could be made in the west for an American chimpanzee but not for a Soviet dog. The same story applied to Ham’s successor, Enos, whose name means “Man” in Hebrew and Greek. It was an apt moniker: Enos’s intelligence was extraordinary. He was the colony’s dazzling ace on the psychomotor, his arms a blur of perfectly coordinated action. In one exercise, each chimp was given a banana after pulling a lever exactly 50 times. Enos picked this up so fast he was soon holding out his hand ready for the banana after the 49th pull. In pictures | Soviet cosmonauts and the birth of the space age What impeded his progress, in the eyes of his handlers, was his anger. “No one ever held Enos,” recalled Dittmer. Enos once even hurled his faeces in the face of a visiting senator. But his superb intelligence could not be ignored, and in November 1961 he, too, was launched from Cape Canaveral to orbit the Earth. He was the first (and last) chimpanzee to do so, in a dress rehearsal for John Glenn’s orbital flight three months later. It was a grim experience. The psychomotor malfunctioned, so that Enos kept getting electric shocks – 35 of them – even when he was pulling the correct lever. Incredibly, there’s some evidence to suggest that he tried to work out what was going wrong and put it right, but the shocks kept coming. After splashing down in his Mercury capsule near Bermuda he ripped off his restraint suit, all of the electrodes and even his catheter, such was his understandable rage. But at least – for a blissful hour and a quarter before the humans arrived in their helicopters – he was free. Canine compliance It was precisely to avoid this sort of dangerous rebelliousness that the Soviets chose dogs rather than primates, though mice, rats and a rabbit were also used. “Dogs,” said Colonel Vladimir Yazdovsky, chief of the USSR’s animal space programme, “respond well to training.” Apes manifestly did not. The Soviet dogs wouldn’t be pulling any levers in space, nor would Soviet cosmonauts. Their job was to obey and endure the mission – and not touch anything. This, after all, was the country where Ivan Pavlov had also trained his dogs, conditioning them to salivate in response to the sound of a ringing bell. In fascinating respects, the superpowers’ animal choices reflected their opposing ideologies. In a society that valued the collective over the individual, independence was not encouraged. Dogs would do as they were told, just like upstanding Soviet citizens. They wouldn’t be ripping out their catheters. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/04/GettyImages-514880242-2567957-e1649327019124.jpg" width="1024" height="731" alt="The capsule containing Ham the “chimponaut” is opened following his return to Earth in 1961" title="The capsule containing Ham the “chimponaut” is opened following his return to Earth in 1961. He lived another 22 years after his suborbital flight; other animal astronauts weren’t so lucky. (Image by Getty Images)" /> So Laika, though the most famous canine cosmonaut, was just one of many. From 1951, the Soviets blasted some 41 dogs into the skies, though – thanks to the programme’s smothering secrecy – the exact number is still unknown. Perhaps as many as 22 died. In the only recorded example of mutiny, one dog managed to run away as she was brought out to her rocket. She was replaced by a puppy unlucky enough to be wandering outside the staff canteen at the wrong moment. The dogs “recruited” into the Soviet space programme were stray females grabbed off Moscow’s streets. Among the many stringent requirements, they had to be small enough to fit inside tiny capsules. In fact, the list of specifications got so long that the dog catchers became exasperated. “Perhaps,” complained one, “you’d also like them to have blue eyes and howl in C major?” Many of these dogs were initially trained by Moscow’s renowned Durov Animal Theatre. Their training took place secretly at the Institute of Aviation and Space Medicine where the dogs were conditioned to increasing levels of confinement over increasing lengths of time. By the end, they could cope without protest while chained inside containers for 20 days at a time. Race for survival None of the Soviet dog launches was publicised – at least, not until a flight was successful. Such was the state’s paranoia that some flights even carried bombs on board, programmed to blow up the spacecraft – along with its hapless dog – should it veer off course and towards some capitalist country such as the US. In December 1960, one Soviet craft did just that – and was duly destroyed. Three weeks later, another with two dogs inside landed by mistake in Siberia. Rescuers had to slog through the worst winter in years to get to the dogs before the bomb blew them up.They did – in the nick of time. And that policy might not have stopped there. Secret records reveal that, when Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space four months later in April 1961, a top KGB general seriously proposed putting a bomb on that flight, too. He was overruled. The USSR stopped launching dogs into space in 1966, but other animals continued to fly to the heavens. Notably, two Russian steppe tortoises went round the moon in September 1968, just ahead of Apollo 8 and its American (human) crew in December. With the Soviet lunar programme falling far behind, the tortoises represented a last-ditch attempt to return to the glory days of Laika. By then, other nations had also got in on the act. In 1963, France sent the only cat into space –a black-and-white female called Félicette, bought from a Parisian pet shop.Dubbed the first “Astrocat”, she was euthanised after her 13-minute flight; so were most of her 14 fellow trainee cats who never got beyond the laboratory. Another was killed when her rocket blew up on the launchpad. As the exigencies of the Cold War faded away and after the USSR collapsed in 1991, the ethical justifications for these animal flights increasingly lost support. In 1996, members of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) chained themselves together inside Nasa’s Washington headquarters in protest at plans to launch two rhesus monkeys into space aboard Bion 11, a collaborative Russian-US biological satellite. More animal history | What was the Emu War? The launch went ahead anyway and Nasa crossed its fingers, praying for a perfect mission. It was not to be. When one of the monkeys, Multik, died while a biopsy was being performed on the day after his two week flight, protests swelled to a fury. No further primates were sent into space by the US or Russia. A major chapter in the history of space exploration was finally closed. Creatures great but small But that wasn’t the end of the story. Aside from one reputed (possibly non-existent) Iranian monkey in 2013, animals now tend to be mice, spiders, bees, flies, fish and tiny tardigrades – the hardiest creatures on our planet. Incredibly, thousands of tardigrades were able to survive for 12 days outside their spacecraft on a 2007 European Space Agency mission. The International Space Station (ISS), first launched in 1998, has hosted a whole menagerie of small animals. As recently as June 2021, a Cargo Dragon spacecraft arrived at the ISS carrying baby squid, to explore the relationship between microbes and their animal hosts. Perhaps China’s new Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace”) space station will soon house animals, joining the toy cow that is already in residence. Like the Soviets, the Chinese also secretly sent dogs into space back in the 1960s, although there have been no dogs on Chinese missions since then. Today, we have come a long way since those pioneering Albert flights 74 years ago. Most of the horrors of those early decades are behind us, but the cost has been high – perhaps too high – and, while the US and Russia celebrate their human space heroes, very few animals have received any accolades. Read more | 6 things you (probably) didn’t know about animals in ancient Rome Dying in 1983 after nearly 20 years living in zoos, Ham had a burial of sorts – albeit minus his skeleton, which is kept in a medical museum in Maryland. Nobody knows what happened to Enos’s body following his death just a year after his flight in 1962. Meanwhile, Belka and Strelka – two once-celebrated Soviet dogs who orbited the Earth in 1960 – sit cutely stuffed in glass boxes at the entrance to a Moscow space museum. As for Nasa’s monkeys, a number survived into very old age at the Ames Research Center in California. Leaked documents later revealed that the last 27, some suffering from Parkinson’s disease, had all been “humanely” euthanised on a single day in 2019. It is an appalling indictment that such things have been allowed to happen, and I hope that a memorial will one day be built to commemorate all these brave animals, just as a memorial now exists in London for those other animals forced to fight in our human wars. It is surely the least they deserve. Stephen Walker is the author of Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Journey into Space (William Collins, 2021) This article first appeared in the March 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine