The winner on the voyage to reach the escalating Moon in the 1960s looks like America on paper, with both the Apollo 8 mission and the Apollo 11 mission.
And the names involved in these missions went down in history as the first creatures to reach the orbit of the Moon.
But this is not true. Two Russian turtles were the winners of this space race. They were the first creatures to reach the orbit of the Moon. Let’s remember these unsung heroes from the Popsci archive.