And, because of Laika's sacrifice, the Soviet space program was now years ahead of the Americans.īased on declassified Soviet space program documents as well as primary source archive, this is a revised version of Laika's one way trip. No provisions were made for her return, and she died in orbit within hours from stress and overheating. But, she gloriously orbited Earth for over a week until her eventual, peaceful death. Laika, dog launched into space on stamp from Pota Român, 1957 Laika, one of the Russian space dogs, was the first living passenger in orbit when she flew on Sputnik 2 ( 3 November 1957 ). Laika, the space dog, became a national hero. If there's one global commonality, it's this: everyone loves dogs. Not because communism was beating democracy in the space race, but because how could anyone send a dog-alone-into space. When the international press reported the Soviets sent a dog into orbit, the public freaked. ***2018 Webby Nominee for best science and education video*** The success of their mission persuaded Soviet authorities to go ahead with the highly risky first space trip by a human, Yury Gagarin, in April 1961.In 1957, a Soviet street dog named Laika launched into space aboard Sputnik-2 and became the first animal to orbit the Earth. The first animals to go into space and return alive were a pair of dogs called Belka and Strelka who blasted off in a rocket on Augand returned a day later. The satellite carrying her remains burnt up in the atmosphere five months later, on April 14, 1958, above the Antilles island group. Moscow maintained this fiction for many years. The official version was that she died after eating poison administered in her food to avoid a painful death on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Soviet radio nevertheless kept broadcasting daily updates on her health, insisting all was well. The hope was that Laika would stay alive for eight to 10 days, but instead she died from overheating and dehydration after a few hours. Then suddenly during the ninth orbit of the Earth, the temperature inside the capsule began to soar and reached over 40 degrees celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), due to insufficient insulation from the Sun's rays. "Of course, during blast-off, Laika's heart beat speeded up a lot."īut after three hours, her heart beat was back to normal. Initially "nothing seemed to be going wrong," Kotovskaya said. Russian scientist Adilya Kotovskaya was charged with preparing Laika for her space mission She was chosen out of five or six candidates for her resourceful yet docile nature and slightly quizzical expression. Laika's name derives from the Russian word for "bark". "And (we chose) strays because they are more resourceful and less demanding."įor publicity reasons, the dogs also had to be photogenic and they were given memorable names. "We chose bitches because they don't have to raise a leg to urinate which means they need less space than the males," Kotovskaya said. Like all the other candidates for space, she was a female stray found on a Moscow street. Laika was a mongrel dog aged around three who weighed six kilograms (13 pounds). The canine candidates spent time in a centrifuge, that simulates the gruelling G-forces created when a rocket blasts off, as well as being exposed to similar noise levels. To get dogs accustomed to the idea of space travel inside a pressurised capsule just 80 centimetres (31 inches) long, Kotovskaya gradually moved them into smaller and smaller cages.Īn effigy of Laika inside a replica of satellite Sputnik II is on display to visitors at the Central House of Aviation and Cosmonautics in Moscow The institute specialises in space science and simulated a flight to Mars in 2010 by making volunteers spend 520 days in isolation. "Now it was time to send one into space," says Kotovskaya, who turned 90 in October but still heads a laboratory at Moscow's Institute of Biomedical Problems. Kotovskaya recalls that before Laika, several dogs had been blasted up into suborbital space for brief periods of a few minutes "to check that it was possible to survive in weightlessness." In a well-timed propaganda effort, it fell just before the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on November 7. "Those nine orbits of Earth made Laika the world's first cosmonaut-sacrificed for the sake of the success of future space missions," says Kotovskaya, who remains proud of her pioneering work as a scientist training Laika and other early space animals.įor Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Laika's voyage was yet another space feat to discomfit the Americans. It followed the first ever Sputnik satellite launch earlier that year.īut things did not go exactly to plan and the dog was only able to survive for a few hours, flying around the Earth nine times. The Soviet Union sent Laika up to spacein a satellite on November 3, 1957-sixty years ago. The former street dog was about to make history as the first living creature to orbit the earth, blasting off on a one-way journey.
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