{"id":242706,"date":"2026-08-14T05:05:55","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T10:05:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/the-first-animals-to-circle-the-moon-werent-astronautsthey-were-two-central-asian-steppe-tortoises-aboard-the-soviet-zond-5"},"modified":"2026-08-14T05:05:55","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T10:05:55","slug":"the-first-animals-to-circle-the-moon-werent-astronautsthey-were-two-central-asian-steppe-tortoises-aboard-the-soviet-zond-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/the-first-animals-to-circle-the-moon-werent-astronautsthey-were-two-central-asian-steppe-tortoises-aboard-the-soviet-zond-5","title":{"rendered":"The first animals to circle the Moon weren\u2019t astronautsthey were two Central Asian steppe tortoises aboard the Soviet Zond 5"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-first-animals-to-circle-the-moon-werent-astronautsthey-were-two-central-asian-steppe-tortoises-aboard-the-soviet-zond-5.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>5 sent two steppe tortoises around the Moon before Apollo 8, but the passenger list and 10 per cent weight-loss figure need context.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>5 sent two steppe tortoises around the Moon before Apollo 8, but the passenger list and 10 per cent weight-loss figure need context.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242706\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}