Iran Plans To Put a Monkey Into Space

arisvega writes "Iran plans to send a live monkey into space in the summer, the country's top space official said after the launch of the Rassad-1 satellite, state television reported on its website on Thursday. 'The Kavoshgar-5 rocket will be launched during the month of Mordad (July 23 to August 23) with a 285-kilogramme capsule carrying a monkey to an altitude of 120 kilometres (74 miles),' said Hamid Fazeli, head of Iran's Space Organisation. No mentioning on retrieving the monkey, though."

Re:This is how you signal ICBM capability

[Yvanhoe]

Reading pre-1958 science fiction is really enlightening about the mindset of the time. No man, no animal had ever gone to this very strange place where the stars always shine, where the air is not there, where gravity takes a break. At this time, no one ever saw a picture of the earth as a blue marble. Space was not the place around earth, it was the place above the clouds, the place from which God and gods had recently been chased in the intellectual pictures of the days.

In one novel, they were imagining that so far from Earth, human minds can not hold. Various craziness appearing. The only way to travel would be to be in a form of coma, half dead.

It is right, they did not know many things about how it was, but their imagination was working at full speed and they surely expected unexpected things. Sending a mammal to be sure that it doesn't get instantly fried by some then unknown effects was a really reasonable step.