Cats in ZERO G #shorts #history #cats

I've talked about this footage before but it is a perennial favorite of mine and a lot of people's so here are cats in microgravity why you might ask because we didn't know anything about space flight in the early 1960s this footage and this experiment was run by the US Air Force's Aerospace medical research lab in the early 1960s one of the questions that needed answering about spaceflight was what would happen if an astronaut or a soldier or someone in a large space station was stuck in the middle space isn't like it looks in old cartoons you can't just do a nice easy breastroke and move through a space station astronauts needed a way to start moving from a standstill and they thought animals might be the answer cats always land on their feet because they flip in the air and they inherently know where down is and scientists wanted to know if a human could do the same thing or at least something equivalent to kind of reorient in space so they took cats into space you can see the cats are flailing around trying to figure out where down is but it doesn't work because there is no down they have the sensation of falling but they don't have a direction in which they're falling so they just flail a whole lot the results of This research was actually a handful of Maneuvers that astronauts could do to generate momentum from a standstill things like standing stock still and then moving your arm in a circle would start you twisting in the direction you needed to be facing this footage is like the prime example of why I love early space flight and early Technologies because we knew nothing and we had to figure it out and the ways were so weird and so creative it's a lot of fun