Ever since the space program started and they sent animals up, I often wondered about cats. Since cats always right themselves, what would happen to a cat weightless in space? Would it keep flipping around trying to right
itself not knowing which is up and which is down?
Not to be patronizing, but people like to be right-side-up too. How do astronauts and cosmonauts handle the lack of gravity?
The terms up and down are relative to where you are. On Earth, “up” is skyward. “Down” would be to dig into the ground. We all know if you go down far enough, you are eventually digging up again. Does that make sense? It’s all relative. Since you are technically in (or depending on your point of view, above) the sky, I think a cat would just float there. Being wieghtless, with nothing to have as a starting point to gauge up or down from, the cat would not know if it’s upside down or not.
No, I doubt it would flip around. It uses gravity to tell which way is up, so if it doesn’t know, it would assume it is right way up. Even if you dropped it (er… lift it and let it float) it would stay as it is, or panic that it’s not going anywhere.
You’ve never seen footage of animal behavior in Space? I, for one, have, and animals in Space look really damn stupid. They have no conception of weightlessness, and less the capacity to analyse it. So all they do is trying to move around, to try to find out of that “zone” and be on their feet. Their senses totally betrays them, and since they can’t rely on their senses and have no analytic capabilities, they are completely lost. They have no idea as to what’s happening to them, where they are, what to do.
Of course it’s a little more complex than that, but you get the idea…
That shows just how much we humans know, when we sent Able or Baker or Laika (and according to Mad, Free Fall Ferris) into space. The chimps and the dog died, and poor Ferris lost his mind. 
Actually, the chimps survived, and were retired to a luxury zoo afterwards. When they did die, it was of plain ordinary old age. Laika (the dog) did die, but not as a result of weightlessness… She was euthanized, because there weren’t any provisions in her craft for re-entry.
According to Encycolpedia Astronautica, Laika’s “euthanization” was an unexpected result of less-than-acceptable temperature fluctuations. There was, however, no plan for recovery of Laika regardless of the circumstances. Incidentally, Sputnik 2 was put together in a little over a month after the resounding success of the first mission. It would appear as if the Soviets never quite picked up on the issues about the dog’s planned demise.
Joe Haldemann wrote in The Forever War that dogs don’t do so well in space, but cats fare rather well. But we’re talking science fiction, here.
According to this site, the first cat in space was (probably) named Felix. He survived a mission atop a French sounding rocket in 1963.
Frankly, having observed more than one cat lose his composure in unusual situations, I wouldn’t dare take one up with me in the shuttle. I think Ranma is right–a cat would more likely freak out in a weightless environment than take to it like water, which cats don’t do very well anyway.
I suspect that a cat would hang on to whatever it could and stay latched there for as long as possible. (like onto some poor astronaut’s head)
Hmm, Sofa King, you’re probably right about that… I learned about Laika back in the eighties, and any informtion about her would have been heavily colored by Russian propaganda… They couldn’t exactly deny that she died, but they could claim that it was humane, and nobody would be the wiser.
By the way, Phobos, that’s a great mental image… heck, I know some cats who’ll do that on Earth!
If you had three cats in a shuttle, and strapped buttered toast to the back of each cat…and set them on orthagonal axes…set the cat spinning you’d have a gyroscopic, space stablized platform.
um…what’s the buttered toast for?
I would be hard put to think of a crueler thing to do to a cat…
I can’t be the only one who saw the OP subject and immediately thought of “Pigs in Space”. Too bad I can’t remember any dialouge from it. Sorry about the hijank, I just had to mention it.
It’s a firmly established axiom of physics that cats always land on their feet. I mean everyone knows that. Toast always falls butter side down. If you strap toast to the back of a cat and toss the package in the air, it will flip over forever, never reaching the ground. The oscillations will be faster in the microgravity of low earth orbit allowing for a fast spin rather than flip-flopping. An elegant perpetual gyroscope that only sheds a little.
Prof. D.P. Gumby,
Immanuel Velikovsky Institute of Hollow Earth Studies.
Amok - Rofl, I remember space captain Link Pork and Dr. Strangepork from that.
That was Capt. Link Hogthrob. The ship was called the Swinetrek.
Egad, but I’ve got a lot of junk in this brainpan of mine!
Y’know, I’m sick and tired of hearing about this spinning-cats-and-toast nonsense. Think about this logically: We know for a fact that cats always land on their feet. For a cat to not land on its feet is impossible. We know for a fact that toast always lands butter side down-- Again, for it to not do so would be impossible. So what do folks say would happen if we dropped a cat with toast strapped to its back? They say it’d hover, which means that neither the cat nor the toast ever lands, which is two impossibilities. Nonsense! What actually happens, of course, is that the cat lands on its feet, as it must, and then promptly rolls over onto its back, so the toast lands butter-down, as it also must. Everything that must happen does, in fact, happen, and it works fine.
Feh. Chronos, I’m surprised that with your background you got such a simple question so horribly wrong.
Clearly, the observed result of strapping a piece of buttered toast to a cat would depend on the frame of reference of the observer. An observer moving away from the toast-cat would see one thing, and an observer moving toward would see another thing entirely. Both would be correct.
This assumes, of course, that the cat is not simultaneously half alive and half dead. But we’re uncertain of that.
This of course if the cat is not a Cheshire cat, in which case if it was, the observer might not see a cat at all.