A dog statue stands on top of a rocket shaped like a hand at Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Moscow, a. The name on the plaque is Cyrillic, but for those familiar with the history of the space race, the name of the dog is familiar: Laika.
Between the United States and Soviet Russia, the 1950s was the height of the space race. Being the first in space was the priority on both sides. However, they needed to ensure it was safe for people there first.
To test things first, they needed a guinea pig. Or, in this case, a dog.
Searching for the Chosen One
Laika was a mongrel, found as a stray wandering the streets of Russia. At around five kilos, she not only had the ideal size and weight but growing up in the cold Russian streets meant she was hardy. Along with fellow dogs Mushka and Albina, scientists Vladimir Yazdovsky and Oleg Gazenko trained Laika for the Sputnik 2 flight.
The training was grueling for the dogs. They would be exposed to sounds similar to a rocket launch, spun around in a centrifuge to mimic a rocket flight, and put in increasingly smaller and smaller holding pens. The stress of the training was so tasking that Laika and her companions suffered from constipation, with their blood pressure and pulses raised to double the normal.
One Way Ticket
The scientists already knew the dog would probably die, whichever of the three would be sent up. No plans were put in place to recover Sputnik 2. In a gesture of kindness for the dog, Yazdovsky took Laika home and treated her as a pet the night before her flight on November 3, 1957.
Things didn’t go smoothly during Laika’s flight. After launch, the cabin’s thermal insulation was damaged, raising the temperature to 40 degrees Celsius. Sensors showed that Laika was stressed the whole time.
According to reports, Sputnik 2 stopped showing life signs around seven hours after launch, and overheating killed Laika by her fourth of the 2570 orbits around Earth before the space capsule burned up on re-entry on April 14, 1958.
Years later, Gazenko said he regretted what they’d done to Laika, saying that what they discovered because of the flight wasn’t enough to justify her death.
Photos by The New Yorker and GuiaRus.com
