In 1966, NASA launched Biosatellite I with 13 biology experiments and more than 10 million organisms; its retrorocket failed, and the spacecraft was never recovered

In December 1966, during the Cold War period of space competition between NASA and the Soviet Union, and roughly two and a half years prior to sending humans to the Moon, the United States space agency secretly launched a strange object into Earth's orbit: a satellite containing more than 10 million organisms, all non-human. NASA's own historical archives state that Biosatellite I was carrying a genuinely ambitious undertaking to determine what space does to living things before humans were too far from home, in which "13 select biology and radiation experiments" were aboard, including some insects, frog eggs, microorganisms and plants.

The capsule's retrorocket then simply failed to ignite, and all the insects, bacteria and more were lost, never to return to Earth. NASA and NSSDC records indicate the reentry vehicle separated as planned, but with the deorbit motor failed, the capsule was left in a slowly decaying orbit; it re-entered and burned up in the atmosphere on February 15, 1967. This outcome is well documented, not an open question.

NASA lost 10 million living things to space


This isn't some esoteric lab mouse study, by the way: Biosatellite I was the first of the three satellites that were designed, as per NASA reports, to investigate "the effects of the space environment on living organisms," from cell biology to circadian rhythms when no one was quite certain what weightlessness and radiation would do to a human body on a multi-year mission. It was constructed by General Electric, and launched from Cape Kennedy on a Delta rocket; it remained in low Earth orbit for some 45 hours while it gathered data before its reentry capsule was supposed to separate and parachute back down where it would be recovered.

Rather, it is reported in the NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive that the reentry vehicle separated as scheduled, but the deorbit rocket failed to fire, leaving the capsule in orbit and resulting in "no useful scientific data." A mission designed to seek out answers to large questions of space survival was swallowed up by a seemingly silly mechanical error, one that seems like it took place in the blink of an eye in terms of history.

The mission that quietly saved the next one

It's not the loss that makes this story worth revisiting, but what NASA did with the failure. Instead of Biosatellite I being a setback, the agency took it as a lesson and applied it to Biosatellite II, which was launched about 9 moths later, in September 1967 with almost the same complement of lifeforms and, this time, returned safely to Earth, though its recovery was actually moved up early due to a tropical storm threat and a communications problem, not completed as a full planned mission.

Why should this matter now

Today, decades later, the questions that Biosatellite I was asking have only grown louder and more costly; private companies and several countries are vying for the Moon, and Mars, and the answers have yet to come. All the organisms NASA has launched since, from fruit flies to a pig-tailed monkey on the ill-fated Biosatellite III in 1969, have been a part of the same plain, everyday, non-glamorous work to help people survive in a place that wasn't designed for them.

No statues or documentaries are dedicated in the name of Biosatellite I. It is given a footnote, a satellite catalog number, and a mention on a NASA history page. And the truth, though, is that many of the failures that never ended up on the launch pad are in the footnotes; these things are corrected, and then the next launch went off without a hitch.