by Kurt Caswell
Remember the famed 1972 photograph of the first full view of the Earth taken from the American spacecraft Apollo 17 on its way to the moon? That single image, known as the Blue Marble, is one of the most reproduced photographs in human history. Why? Because it, more than any other image, brings human beings face-to-face—and for the first time—with the vulnerability and special quality of our planet home. Because that photograph allows us to see, to witness, even to feel that the Earth is fragile, and its fragility makes it beautiful. Because that image brings us all to square with what we have always known: that we have but one home, one Earth, and we must take care of it, if we are to survive. “[The Earth] truly is an oasis,” said Apollo 15 commander Dave Scott in an interview for the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, “and we don’t take very good care of it. I think the elevation of that awareness is a real contribution to saving the Earth.” It’s a jewel, he said, the “jewel of the Earth hanging in the blackness of space.”
On April 12, 1961, some four years after Laika’s mission, the Soviet Union put the first human being into orbit, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. During his single orbit of the Earth, Gagarin gazed back on our planet home. He could not see the Earth entire as the Apollo astronauts would as they sailed away from it, but he was the first human being to look down from up so high. “Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is,” Gagarin later wrote. “People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it.” Gagarin’s is a necessary plea, and further evidence that seeing the Earth from space changes the fundamental way we think of ourselves, making it difficult to see ourselves as superior to other living beings, as the inheritors of a planet filled with resources and placed here for us, as made in the image of a benevolent god. Seeing the Earth from space, we must face a terrifying reality: that we are fragile, vulnerable, and possibly alone. What shall we do with this new point of view? How shall we account for who and what we are, and for the fragility and essentiality of our planet?
Did Laika see this sight too? Did Laika see it first? And what value is there in knowing, or not knowing, that she did?
Whether she could or not, by imagining the view from Laika’s window—from the inside of her capsule looking out—perhaps we can learn more about her and more about ourselves too: who we are as a species, with our appetite for exploration and knowledge, our appetite for power too, running side by side with our compassion, our empathy, and even our love for the planet we live on.
And Laika’s story is about loneliness, about loneliness as fundamental to being human. If we can trust poet Sylvia Plath, loneliness is an assertion of our need for each other, our need for “another soul to cling to.” In clinging to another soul, we do find comfort, but we lose that comfort to partings, breakups, wars, death, as if the universe itself is so hinged as to cycle us through loneliness and comfort and then loneliness again like seasons turning across the years. These seasons of losses are the linchpins of all this loneliness, loneliness no human being can escape. In response to it, we cast our net into the cold, black cosmos, our net of satellites, telescopes, rovers, probes, spacecraft, space stations: is anything out there? Is anyone out there? And we send our dogs out too, out into the void to help us with the question we all hope to answer: are we alone in the universe? Are we special, or are we instead rather ordinary because life abounds out there? Will it one day be possible to establish fellowship with other beings on other worlds? Whether we will or not, human life is without meaning without one another, and without animals; all we have is each other. As the novelist Kurt Vonnegut stated in a 1974 commencement address, “The most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
Laika’s story, then, is important because it draws us into an ethical relationship with animals we depend on, specifically with dogs as our companions in cosmic exploration. We are operating here in our search of the heavens at the very limit of our technological capability, and right beside us, with Laika as its apologue, is the dog, the animal with which we share a close evolutionary history. Wherever human beings go, whatever human beings do, our dogs go and do it with us. Sojourning with our dogs on the hunt for answers, even across an ocean of stars, is itself a kind of comfort. If adventure and exploration are evidence of an innate loneliness in the human animal, they are also an antidote to that loneliness. Space exploration, ultimately, may be a search for a cure for loneliness.
Finally, at its core, this book is a story about a dog. It is a biography of sorts, a portrait, a memorial. This book belongs to Laika and to all the space dogs who traveled before and after her. Through the stories of their journeys into space, perhaps we will all find ourselves a little more grounded here on Earth.
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In order to understand Laika’s story, it is important to come to know some of the other animals that have flown into space, who sent them and why, and what benefit, if any, resulted from their missions. It is also essential to acquaint ourselves with the stories of the other space dogs, those that flew before Laika, and those that flew after. Chapter 2, “Animals in the Heavens,” traces the story of animals in space from the earliest documented flights in hot air balloons in the eighteenth century to the animals that are part of the ongoing science aboard various satellites and on the ISS. Since the 1970s, robotic rovers and probes have mostly replaced nonhuman animal explorers and have been loosely remade in their image. While this book is not an indictment of research using animals, and it is especially not an indictment of the Soviet scientists, or any others, who launched animals into space, it does ask questions about the value of such research weighed against the suffering of the animals.
Chapter 3, “The Making of a Space Dog,” returns to the story of Laika to detail her training and includes generally the training that all Soviet space dogs endured. It also introduces Sergei Korolev, the Soviet chief designer, whose single-purpose life serves as a balefire for humanity’s entrance into the Space Age. This chapter prepares the way to better understand the specific details of Laika’s flight on Sputnik II. Chapter 4, “Scouting the Atmosphere,” features the stories of the most notable space dog flights before and after Laika. While a few of these flights rival Laika’s for achievement in endurance and advancements in technology, it is clear that she serves as a tipping point in space exploration, beyond which the dream of exploring nearby and distant planets opened into a kind of fever from which humanity has never recovered. Now that we know space travel is possible, it seems to me, we are no longer content with living solely on Earth. This chapter also brings us to the conclusion of Korolev’s story and positions him as the man who matched, if not exceeded, the achievements of the greatest minds in space exploration. Like Laika, he will forever be listed among those who did it first and those who did it best.
With these preparations, chapters 5 and 6, “A Face in the Window” and “First Around the Earth,” tell the story of Laika’s flight. In these pages I have assembled—and I think for the first time—an intimate portrait of Laika: where she came from, what she endured, and what her flight means for us all. I use what is known to imagine what cannot be known: Laika’s experience inside her capsule during her time in orbit, for example. Here my purpose is not melodrama or embellishment but witness and understanding. In addition, my research brought me to an as yet unacknowledged truth about Laika’s flight and death, which I hope aids our understanding of her and our understanding of ourselves, which is this book’s main premise.
Finally, the epilogue addresses what comes next in human space exploration and draws a straight line from the aspirations of the earliest rocket scientists in the late nineteenth century, who dreamed of traveling to Mars, to Robert Zubrin and the Mars Society and Elon Musk and his SpaceX in the twenty-first century. While Laika is the Earth’s first space traveler, she was also one scout among many, sent out ahead to gather information to help us all on our journey to the stars.
TWO
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nbsp; Animals in the Heavens
All the universe is full of the life of perfect creatures.
KONSTANTIN TSIOLKOVSKY
“The Scientific Ethics,” 1930
While Laika was the first living being in orbit, she was not the first living being in space. By the time of Laika’s flight, both the Soviet Union and the United States had been experimenting for a decade with suborbital rocket flights carrying dogs and monkeys, respectively, but also fruit flies, mice, and other living things, just beyond the Karman line (100 kilometers or about 62 miles altitude) that marks the boundary of space. It was the Hungarian American physicist Theodore von Karman who first calculated that at this altitude, the atmosphere becomes too thin to support traditional flight. To navigate, and even to survive, a pilot needed a wholly new kind of craft, not an aircraft at all but a spacecraft lifted into the heavens on the nose of a rocket.
Some of these early experimental rockets carrying animals blew up on the launchpad, some turned and tumbled in the sky and blew up, some flew erratically and strayed off-course and were destroyed by charges inside the rocket detonated by a ground crew, and some rockets flew up and up into space, where they sojourned in microgravity, then turned a delicate arc back to Earth, the braking chutes deploying and slowing the spacecraft for a landing on the ground. And when the scientists and engineers arrived to retrieve those spacecraft and their animal passengers, sometimes they found them dead and sometimes they found them alive. And all of it in pursuit of science to reveal the mysterious conditions of space, and to one day give them confidence enough to risk sending the first human being off the planet. Human spaceflight, human voyages to nearby and distant planets, has always been the goal, even from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the first spacecraft designs took form in the minds of a few visionaries from Russia (later the Soviet Union), Germany, and the United States, among other countries. Sputnik II, carrying Laika, was neither the beginning nor the end. It was one step along a winding path in the exploration of the final frontier, but a giant step to be sure, one for the record books.
Since those early rocket flights in the Soviet Union and the United States, five more nations have flown animals in space: France, Argentina, China, Japan, and Iran. The list of the kinds of animals, and also plants, sent into space is dizzying and includes quail and quail eggs, butterflies, mollusks, various fish, including the mummichog minnow and the oyster toadfish (a hideous beast at best), various mosses, oat and mung bean seedlings, newts, worms of all sorts, and nematodes, which come in all sorts too. Cats, rabbits, rats, Madagascar hissing cockroaches (thanks to Russia), and not to leave out molds, yeasts, crickets, snails, ladybugs, ants, moths, houseflies, fruit flies, gnats, bees, scorpions, spiders, all kinds of cells including chunks of human skin (which are groups of cells), and of course, guinea pigs.
In 2016 SpaceX launched eight species of fungi found growing at the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site in the former Soviet Union into space. Scientists are studying the way these fungi manage radiation, a primary challenge for all living things traveling in space. Also in 2016 several strains of herpes were flown into space to study how and why the virus worsens, and even mutates, in microgravity. Two-thirds of all humans carry herpes, and many of us do not know we carry it. This research is especially important for crew members on long-duration spaceflights. The first flower grown in space is the zinnia, which unfurled on the International Space Station in 2016, and NASA has been growing red romaine lettuce on the station too, studying fresh food production for an eventual journey to Mars. Like rats on sixteenth-century sailing ships, microbes have hitched rides into space in and on spacecraft. A group of scientists are now tracking and studying the microbial life flourishing on the ISS. In fact, a bacterium, Solibacillus kalamii (named after scientist A. P.J. Abdul Kalam, who became the eleventh president of India), has been found only on the ISS—it has not been found on Earth—suggesting that life from Earth can mutate in such a way as to manage life in space, or that life is already out there. And out there on Mars, despite our best efforts to prevent it, microbial life from Earth likely holds on to various landers and surface rovers. In late 2016 NASA steered the Mars rover Curiosity away from possible water sources on the red planet so as not to contaminate them with Earth microbes.
Other objects, too, surprising and strange, have been sent into space, among them the light saber Luke Skywalker used in Return of the Jedi, images of Playboy models secreted away in the task notebooks of Apollo 12 astronauts, a wheel of Gruyère cheese, dinosaur bones, Coke and Pepsi, a Pizza Hut pizza (literally the first out-of-this world delivery), a Buzz Lightyear toy, Amelia Earhart’s watch, and samples of the remains of the late Gene Roddenberry (creator of Star Trek), James Doohan (who played Scotty in the original Star Trek), and astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, whose sample of remains reached Pluto on July 14, 2015, on NASA’s New Horizons probe, because the man discovered it.
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As far as anyone knows, the first animal test flight in the history of the world took place on November 19, 1783, at Versailles. This is, of course, not including the certainty that for the past two hundred thousand years, boys have tested the reliability of gravity by cruelly launching little animals off high places. The Montgolfier brothers, Joseph and Étienne, were not cruel boys, however, but young inventors and entrepreneurs with talent in mechanics and science who had been experimenting with hot air balloons for about a year. They arrived at this work, so the story goes, when Joseph, the starry-eyed dreamer with a reputation for reciting Voltaire, was drying his wife’s chemise by the heat of a wood fire. Filling temporarily with hot air, the garment billowed up. In his excitement, Joseph’s mind began to wander: could not a sack or balloon of some kind fill with such air and so be borne aloft? If so, could not a balloon of greater size be constructed, filled with the heat of a fire, and so bear something of weight, a man, for example, up into the sky? With such a balloon, Joseph wondered while clutching his wife’s chemise, was it possible that a man could fly?
Another account has Joseph gazing at a painting of the siege of Gibraltar, that three-year failed attempt by Spanish and French forces to take Gibraltar from the British during the American Revolution. The siege was even then under way, and Joseph, a good Frenchman, his mind bent on aiding his country, recalled a past moment watching sparks drawn up a flue. He wondered if men, like sparks, might be drawn up on a draft of air from a fire, up and over the castle walls, thus impregnating impregnable Gibraltar. Flight has always been associated with military conquest.
It was time to perform an experiment. In his rented rooms in Avignon, Joseph stretched a bolt of taffeta around a light wood frame and lit a wad of paper in the cavern of it, and the whole thing floated up to the ceiling. As Charles Coulston Gillispie reports in The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation, 1783–1784, Joseph immediately wrote to his brother, Étienne: “Get in a supply of taffeta and of cordage, quickly, and you will see one of the most astonishing sights in the world.”
Luckily the family business was papermaking, a high-tech industry in the eighteenth century. The brothers set to work experimenting with paper balloons, which became known as Montgolfières, and the hot air that inflated them as Montgolfier gas. Gas, because the brothers had yet to understand that the fire heated the air, and that hot air is lighter than cold air, so it rises. Instead they concluded that the combination of fire and smoke caused a chemical reaction with the air and the resulting gas filled the balloon. No matter how it worked, it worked, and so the brothers partnered with several interested friends, including Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, a successful manufacturer of wallpapers. Surely, writes Gillispie in his book, it is due to the association of Réveillon with the work of the Montgolfiers “that the iconography of balloons has evolved out of the patterning of eighteenth-century wallpaper.”
On that day in Versailles, the brothers planned a public demonstration. They had already put claim to their invention (and so the invention of aviation
) with a previous public demonstration, which launched from Annonay on June 4, 1783. But this flight in Versailles would be different. First, the Montgolfier brothers had to contend with the success of another ballooning pair, Jacques Alexandre César Charles and Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, who had only a month before launched a helium-filled balloon from the Champ de Mars. Second, the brothers were to stage this launch before the Royal Palace and before royalty—namely the king, Louis XVI, and his queen, Marie Antoinette (not so much later, both would lose their heads to the guillotine). And third, the brothers would raise the stakes by flying a living animal. After some deliberation on what animal to fly (some suggested a dog, so that while ascending into the sky, the crowd of onlookers could hear it bark), the brothers settled on a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. The duck and the rooster were control animals for the sheep. The duck was expected to manage the altitude without trouble, but what would happen to the rooster, no one knew. And what happened to that sheep during the flight, a mammal with a physiology not unlike human beings, would be akin to what would happen to a man, so the thinking went. If the sheep came down no worse for wear, then the brothers would most certainly make plans for a manned flight. They called the sheep Monteauciel, meaning “ascend to the sky.”
A great crowd gathered at the Royal Palace. All the chateau windows and the rooftops were crowded with onlookers. The balloon had been constructed hastily, in just four days’ time, when the intended paper balloon—a beautiful thing measuring seventy feet high by forty feet wide, with a background colored in azure and ornamented with gold in representation of the sun—was destroyed by rain. For this new balloon, the brothers had turned again to taffeta, that crisp, smooth silk fabric, and coated it with varnish against all weathers. It was not as big but equally stunning, a bright blue bulb ribboned by two golden bands.