Book Description

Excerpt from Biospex, Biological Space Experiments: A Compendium of Life Sciences Experiments Carried on U. S. Spacecraft The United States space effort has had a long, though not always well known, history of Life Science experimentation. Long before the birth of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration biological payloads were being launched. The first documented flight carrying a living payload was a V-2 rocket in 1948. The captured rocket carried a primate, Albert, in a specially designed nosecone. The Navy was responsible for this flight, and as time progressed, the Army became involved. The Army used a ballistic rocket as the means of carrying the experiments. After several unsuccessful and semi-successful flights, the historic Abel and Baker flight was accomplished. The two primates carried on the flight were returned alive and well. From this point on, more and more Life Science experiments were returned alive. With the beginning of NASA, the military surrendered sole rights to flight studies. The agency started its Life Sciences program with chimpanzee flights in preparation for Project Mercury. From the space experience with Ham and Enos, the chimps, it was deemed that the space environment was safe for man, and Alan Shepard and John Glenn were launched into the relative unknown. The early Mercury flights marked the beginning of inflight biomedical experimentation on humans. During all of the manned spaceflight programs, a large number of experiments have been conducted on the flight crews. There have been numerous biological studies in the space environment ranging from high energy particle effects on cellular organisms to fully instrumenting and flying a monkey. Satellites have been solely devoted to biological investigations, such as the Biosatellite series and the joint U.S.- U.S.S.R. KOSMOS 782 mission. The following document is a compendium of Life Science investigations that have taken place on U.S. spacecraft. Previously, there had been no complete compilation of the experiments, making it difficult to determine what has been attempted and accomplished in space Life Sciences. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.