Tony Dreher’s experience:
His projects include maintenance of the Hubble Telescope. Worked on creating telephone booth sized instruments that got plugged into the telescope. Four different missions delivered updated hardware and software.
New space craft James Web Space Telescope mirror system. Scheduled for launch in 2020 to 2021. Five year project developing new telescope to replace the Hubble space telescope.
How hard is it to get stuff into space?
Very hard, very hard to do. Extremely hard to get things in space, we spend a lot of time and money developing hardware to get things in space. Key testing includes vibration and acoustic testing as well as Thermal and environment testing. This can take several years to get something approved for launch.
Would it be feasible to get a live animal in space?
Yes – probably. First space flights were animals. Some came back alive. These were test subjects.
Would it be feasible to have a pet in space?
Don’t know, probably require a lot of testing. Would be very expensive. Would need to test just to if the animal might survive launch and in-space survival. Cats might not work well without some sort of gravity. Just the testing would be very difficult and involved. You need to do the most you can with the least you send up. Each pound costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to launch into space. A lot of money and time is spent simply trimming weight from hardware items. It seems like it might be hard to justify the weight of live pets.
Pets in space may be feasible, but the cost and difficulty would not be a high enough goad to pursue.
What about a live feed with remote controlled cat toys?
Yes – that definitely could happen. A robotic cat in space that mimics what the real one does would be cool. Just having something that connect pets to people sounds like a great idea. I don’t know of anything like that right now.