If only NASA had sent a football player into space

Posted on October 19, 2013

Animals had been used in aeronautic exploration since 1783 when the Montgolfier brothers sent a sheep, a duck and a rooster aloft in a hot air balloon. The first animals sent into space were fruit flies aboard a U.S.-launched V-2 rocket on February 20, 1947. The purpose of the experiment I’m lead to believe, was to explore the effects of radiation exposure at high altitudes. The rocket reached 68 miles (109 km) in 3 minutes and 10 seconds, past both the U.S. 50-mile and the international 100 km definitions of the edge of space.

On August 31, 1950, the U.S. launched a mouse into space.

On May 28, 1959, aboard the JUPITER AM-18, Able, a rhesus monkey, and Miss Baker, a squirrel monkey, became the first monkeys to successfully return to Earth after traveling in space.

 

Then later in August 19, 1960 Russia launched Sputnik 5 (also known as Korabl-Sputnik 2) which carried the dogs Belka and Strelka. It was the first spacecraft to carry animals into orbit and return them alive.

On April 11, 1967, Argentina also launched the rat Belisario, atop an Orion II rocket from Cordoba military range, which was recovered successfully.

The first tortoise in space was launched September 14, 1968 by the Soviet Union.

Two bullfrogs were launched on a one-way mission on the Orbiting Frog Otolith satellite on November 9, 1970, to understand more about space motion sickness.

               if only they’d sent a footballer into space.

So we fast-forward through the years until we get to 2013 and boy what an age we live in. This whole racism issue surrounding The current England football manager beggars belief.  So the guy is a racist for having said ‘…feed the monkey‘ in reference to a situation where what is needed and intended as the advice, is:    ‘more of the same’..its working; don’t change a thing‘ – THAT, says Roy, was what he meant and here is more on why I think I understand where he’s coming from.

The joke is one that became popular at Nasa, the US space agency, in the 1960s and 1970s after it sent monkeys into space before humans. One version of the joke is that the first time Nasa sends a man up into space a monkey goes with him. The monkey is highly trained having had previous experience unlike the man, and so it’s the monkey manning the life support systems, operating the flight controls and responding to NASA control expertly by the use of programmed buttons with speech responses and does all the skilled technical jobs inside the rocket. It’s going great. Finally the astronaut gets frustrated and radios Nasa to ask what he should do.

Nasa replies: “Don’t touch anything – just feed the monkey.”

So the phrase becomes popular (i’m guessing not as popular as Roy would have thought) and perhaps we should really be blaming NASA since if only they had sent a football player at the time; we’d not be in this mess right now. Or if only the duck had done a better job in the initial years testing.

Roy was trying to illustrate the need for England’s defenders to play the ball early to Townsend while he was in space on the flanks. The anti-racism group Kick It Out have deemed the furore surrounding Roy Hodgson’s ‘space monkey’ joke to have been “concluded” (taken from the guardian newspaper) following the Football Association’s investigation into the comments made by the England manager and good on them –  in my opinion but should help put this matter to rest, that is, after you’ve read, shared and commented on this blog of mine okay.