Félicette's Story
Félicette's space travel was inspired by the successful flights of the superpowers' animal missions. Instead of dogs, monkies, or even flies, France decided that they wanted to send a cat to space. Félicette was chosen as our lucky little feline astronaut between fourteen total stray cat candidates. At first, names weren't given to the cats to prevent the scientists from becoming attached to them. Félicette was known as "C341", among other female cats very similar to her. Each individual feline was fitted with electrodes in their heads that could read brain activity and report back. From there, they began their "astronaut training", mainly consisting of the cats experiencing a centrafugal experience meant to simulate the G-force of blasting off and re-entering Earth's atmosphere.
In 1983, on the morning of October 18, Félicette was sent up to space on the Veronique rocket. The total duration of her trip lasted around thirteen minutes, and she was only in space for five. Félicette reached an altitude of 157 kilometers before falling back to earth, inevitibly landing upside down until she was able to be rescued. Once C341 was home, the name "Felix" was given to fill the absence of an actual name, until it was discovered that she was a female and it was changed to "Félicette". Although she seemed to have gotten her happy ending coming home completely unscathed, scientists made the decision to euthanise her two months later with the goal to study the effects on her body. However, the experiment was fruitless, and yielded no useful information.