With the final space shuttle scheduled to launch July 8 carrying an iPhone and a mutant strain of salmonella, we're taking a look at some of the strangest things that have ridden along with the shuttle astronauts into space.

Over the last 30 years and 134 missions, the shuttle has helped launch three great observatories -- Hubble, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, missions to study Venus, Jupiter and the sun, and more than 350 astronauts.

But with its promise of easy transport into a low gravity environment, the shuttle has also taken some truly weird stuff into space. When Atlantis takes off for the last time, it will carry an iPhone and a mutant strain of salmonella. The scientific value of forcing bees to build hives or fish to swim in zero-g is still up for debate, but we have to admit it probably wouldn't have happened without the shuttle.

Here are some of our favorite critters that the shuttle gave a shot at space.

Female frogs flew aboard Endeavour in September 1992 to see how weightlessness changes the way tadpoles grow. Half the frog eggs laid on the shuttle developed in microgravity, and half in a centrifuge that simulated normal gravity.

All the eggs developed into normal-looking tadpoles. But after returning to Earth, tadpoles raised in microgravity apparently drowned. Raised without a sense of up and down, they couldn't find the surface of the water in order to take their first breaths.

Image: NASA