The Forgotten Story Of C341 — Or Félicette — The French Feline Who Was Launched Into Space In 1963

Forbes

20-04-2025

While the Soviets sent man's best friend into space, the French had other plans. Meet Félicette, the ... More feline astronaut history forgot.
You don't have to be a pet parent to know that dogs and cats are like night and day. The history of dogs, at least in their current form, traces back around 15,000 years. According to current scientific consensus, toward the end of the Last Ice Age, more submissive individuals within the gray wolf population began adapting to human interaction in ways they hadn't before. Many of the friendly traits these proto-dogs developed are still with us, only now, they're genetically wired to read and respond to us.
Unlike dogs, cats appear to have 'domesticated themselves,' choosing to live alongside humans while maintaining their independence, a process that began 9,000 years ago. That might sound on-brand for cat meme material, but the science backs it up. Housecat DNA remains largely unchanged from their wild ancestors, and history has shown that these furballs are never too far from flipping back into elite predator mode when the right opportunity strikes.
All of this context makes the story of France's 1960s feline space mission even heavier.
In 1947, the United States made space history with a swarm of fruit flies. Launched aboard a captured German rocket, these unusual passengers were sent to study the effects of cosmic radiation on living organisms.
As the Cold War escalated, space became the stage for geopolitical flexing. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R were aiming for more than just technological milestones. It was a brazen display of ideological one-upmanship. In 1957, the Soviets launched Laika into space, and by the early '60s, animals had become central to space programs around the world, their lives traded for data in the race beyond Earth.
This is the backdrop in which France — late to the party but eager to join the club — made a curious choice. While the Soviets sent dogs and the Americans trained primates, France turned to stray cats, plucked from the streets of Paris.
Fourteen female cats were brought in by scientists at CERMA, France's space medicine program. None of them were named. In fact, in a small attempt to keep things clinical, they were deliberately given ID numbers instead of names. It was treated as pre-launch protocol.
The cats were wired up with electrodes to monitor brain activity and put through a bootcamp of sorts. They were confined in tight containers for long periods, just to observe their reactions. Then came the centrifuge — designed to simulate the crushing G-forces of launch and re-entry.
For animals that had once stalked alleyways and rooftops, it was an abrupt shift in lifestyle. Eventually, six cats made it to the final round. One of them, a black-and-white tuxedo with the designation C341, stood out. Not because she was stronger, faster or more willing, but because she was the one who got chosen.
An unnamed stray, strapped into a capsule, headed for a once-in-a-lifetime journey past the Kármán line.
A slender Veronique AGI rocket stood poised at the Interarmy Special Vehicles Test Centre in the Algerian Sahara. There was no towering launch tower. Instead, there were four long legs holding it upright. Inside the capsule sat C341 — still unnamed, still wired up and still unaware she was a participant in a geopolitical power struggle.
The rocket lifted off just after 8 a.m. and carried her beyond the bureaucratic boundary of space, the Kármán line. She hit 9.5 g on the way up, spent a few minutes in weightlessness, then came back down under 7 g, sealed inside a capsule with no windows and no context. It lasted 13 minutes.
She flew 57 kilometers past the accepted edge of space, and minutes later, she landed upside down in the sand. When the press got hold of the story and assumed the space cat was male, they called her Félix. The scientists corrected them — Félicette. And with that, C341 finally had a name. However, it would take decades for anyone to remember it.
Félicette didn't get a reunion tour or a retirement cushion. Just a few weeks after her return, she was euthanized so scientists at CERMA could study her body. The goal was to see how spaceflight had affected her internal systems. But the results were underwhelming. Whatever they were hoping to find, they didn't. The postmortem taught them little.
In the end, she was cataloged like any other lab subject. One experiment in a series. The only cat ever sent to space, and yet, for years, barely a footnote in history. That would change. But not for a while, and not in the same way we remember Laika.
Félicette's story was rediscovered in an era that had grown more reflective about the costs of our ambitions, particularly on non-consenting, non-human participants. In 2019, a statue was unveiled in her honor at the International Space University in Strasbourg. Cast in bronze, it showed her sitting atop Earth, looking up at the stars she once flew so close to. This gesture was the best we could come up with.
While it's only human to romanticize her, part of what makes her story so tragic is how unromantic it is. No one claimed she volunteered. She was a street cat who ended up strapped into a rocket. And yet, something about her legacy painfully lingers.
This may be because cats, despite all their independence, have evolved to understand us in subtle, unsettling ways. They respond to human emotion. They know how to earn food, how to navigate social cues and how to win affection without losing autonomy. Evolution, it seems, didn't overwrite their instincts, it just rewired how they manage risk and reward in human environments.
In that sense, Félicette was the perfect subject: independent enough to survive the streets of Paris, adaptable enough to tolerate confinement and familiar enough for her absence to finally sting — just a few decades too late.
While Félicette's story is a slow burn, the cost of human progess has turned into a display of the snowball effect in action. Take the Climate Change Worry Scale to learn more about your attitude toward our collective actions.