INTRODUCTION 



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. It is divided 



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