A Tough Chapter to Write

 

I'm finally getting my groove juggling three separate writing gigs - my two or three articles per week for TravelAwaits, the 5th Edition of "Hiking Alabama", and my latest book, "Space Oddities".

For the latter, I'm working on a chapter titled, "In Memory of Laika", and finding myself having a tough time getting through it. Not only because of the tragic details of the first orbiting animal, but also the many other animals that were loaded into a rocket, many of whom met a terrible death.

Most people don't know it but the first animal to fly into space was a rhesus monkey named Albert II in 1949. He reached an altitude of 83-miles. There were four monkeys in all named Albert that were launched during Project Blossom in 1948 and 1949. All four met with untimely deaths - three died on impact when their parachutes failed while one rocket exploded.

And that's only the beginning of the story of animals in space. Ugh! Somehow, I will get through this chapter.