Memorial to France’s Forgotten Space Cat Finds Home, New Design

The effort to erect a memorial to honor the only cat known to have traveled to space and back is making some progress.

Matthew Serge Guy led a 2017 Kickstarter campaign, with 1,141 donors pledging more than $57,000 toward the design and creation of a monument to Felicette. The feline astronaut was launched on a French rocket in 1963, experiencing weightlessness and splashdown before being studied for a few months. Ultimately, this space cat was euthanized for further study.

Earlier this year, a location for Felicette’s crowdfunded monument was nailed down: International Space University in Strasbourg, France. The Felicette statue will share space in the university’s Pioneer’s Hall with a bust of Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who became the first man and human to travel to outer space in 1961-a couple of years before Felicette’s own journey.

Now, a design for the memorial is starting to come into focus after some soul-searching.

Guy originally envisioned a Felicette statue sitting upon a rocket, but he said recently that this has been ruled out due to the practical problems involved with juxtaposing a large rocket with a small cat. He added that since the cat was forced by humans to travel in a rocket against her will, it also seemed insensitive to…