A cat on a mission 🚀🚀🚀

Image from Pixabay

Lunetta was a small gray cat with yellow eyes. She was very playful, particularly attracted to round objects: balls, buttons, bottle caps. If the object was spherical, Lunetta would chase it until she was exhausted.

One summer evening, her owner, Gabriel, decided to watch an old documentary about Apollo 11. Sitting on the couch, he gazed at the black-and-white NASA images while the narrator spoke solemnly about the 1969 moon landing. “One small step for man…” he murmured, almost in sync with Neil Armstrong.

Lunetta wasn't interested in the words. But she noticed one detail: the moon on the screen looked like a perfect ball… and she loved balls. She jumped onto the table, almost touching the screen with her nose, and stared at that luminous sphere as if it were the most irresistible of toys.

“Ah, if only I could catch her…” she meowed to herself.

That night, while Gabriel slept, Lunetta put her plan into motion. She stole a steel strainer from the kitchen table, dragged an old cardboard box into the hallway, and collected pieces of foil from the pantry. With a little work, she managed to give the box a vaguely futuristic look.

In the morning, Gabriel found the mess in the living room. Lunetta was staring at him seriously, and Gabriel decided to help her complete the mission.
He hung a tennis ball from a string to create the moon, right above the cardboard box. Lunetta, wearing the strainer as a helmet, immediately jumped into the box, ready to go.

“Mission Apollo-Kitty, countdown in 3… 2… 1…” Zzzzzzzzz! Lunetta leaped out like a rocket, snatching the hanging ball in mid-air.

Gabriel, amused, filmed the whole thing on his phone and posted it online. Within a few days, "The Astronaut Cat" went viral. Comments from around the world filled the page.

Among the messages, there was even one from a retired space engineer, who wrote: "If I had had Lunetta in '69, perhaps the moon landing would have been even more spectacular!"

From that day on, Gabriel and Lunetta had a new routine: a weekly "space launch." Each time, they changed the setting: one time the moon was a paper ball, another a giant Christmas ball, another a balloon.

For Lunetta, it didn't matter if the real moon was out of reach: the important thing was to chase it, jump, and land. Every time a new adventure!