Russia's struggling space program suffered another setback when one of two monkeys just back from a two-week space mission died on an operating table.
Multik, a macaque who returned to Earth on Tuesday, died at a Moscow research institute Thursday after routine surgery to collect samples of muscle and blood cells, officials told the ITAR-Tass news agency."An accident has happened which we could not foresee," said Yevgeny Ilyin, deputy director of Moscow's Institute of Medico-Biological Problems.
Both Ilyin and an American medical group that advocates animal research said that despite the monkey's death, the mission had been successful from a scientific standpoint.
Multik and another monkey cosmonaut, Lapik, were sent into orbit last month as part of the Russian-U.S.-French Bion project to study the effects of zero gravity on living organisms and their re-adaptation to conditions on Earth.