by Kurt Caswell
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Sputnik II was a cone-shaped satellite sitting on top of a modified R-7 rocket, the world’s first ICBM. The satellite consisted of three main components, stacked one on top of the other. On top was a small cylindrical instrument package with two spectrophotometers for measuring solar radiation, especially in the ultraviolet and X-ray regions of the spectrum, as well as cosmic radiation. In the middle was a spherical container that had been built as a backup for Sputnik I, containing batteries, radio transmitters, and other instruments. And on the bottom, Laika, inside a cylindrical pressurized capsule with its small round window. When completed, Sputnik II measured 13 feet long and 7 feet wide at its base and weighed 1,120 pounds, six times heavier than Sputnik I.
Laika’s capsule was made of aluminum alloy and measured 31.5 inches long by 25 inches in diameter, not very big at all, but then she wasn’t a very big dog. In his book Korolev, James Harford remarks that the capsule was not built specifically for Laika; rather, the team modified the capsule that housed Dezik and Tsygan on the first suborbital space dog flight in 1951. Inside the capsule Laika was positioned on a cork floor with sides coming up above her, a slot, really, just her size. Restraints limited her movement and secured her during the rocket’s ascent and in orbit, and helped ensure that she did not tear loose from the sensors attached to her body. Despite these restrictions, Laika could lie down comfortably, sit hunched over, and move forward and backward, but she could not turn around.
The small round window made the capsule look as if it had an eye, and it was sometimes called a “Cyclops chamber.” A crate or kennel used to transport or confine dogs is similarly designed, and when inside, a dog will almost always face the door, the end where the most light enters, not unlike a wolf in its den. It makes sense that a denning animal like a dog would fare much better on an extended spaceflight than a monkey or a chimp evolved to live in forests and forest canopies and on open scrublands. These considerations must have driven the design and installation of the window, but the primary purpose had to be observation from the outside. The caregivers and scientists used the window to monitor Laika during training and preflight preparations. During flight, the window was of use only to the dog. Some sources speak of a video camera mounted inside Laika’s capsule, but they are surely in error. In all my searching, I could find no photographs or video footage of Laika, either during liftoff or in orbit. The ground crew had no way to visually monitor her after they secured the protective fairing over the nose cone of the rocket.
One of the problems the team struggled to solve was carrying enough battery power for the duration of Laika’s mission, which was planned for seven days in orbit. Today’s network of satellites and ground stations makes it possible to transmit and receive information nearly anywhere on Earth. In 1957, however, Sputnik II had to fly over a ground station that could receive its signal for only about fifteen minutes, after which it passed out of range. Why keep putting the signal out if there was no Soviet station below to receive it, the team asked? To save critical battery power, they installed an automatic switch that turned the telemetry system on only when the satellite was passing over such a ground station.
Simply put, a rocket is a payload sitting on top of a fuel tank with an engine. The majority of its weight comes from its fuel, not its payload, but the payload has to be within range of what the rocket can lift into space beyond its own weight. Until Sputnik II, nothing over 180 pounds had ever been lifted into orbit, and that was Sputnik I. Of primary importance then was keeping Sputnik II light, slimming it down wherever and however possible. The team decided it would keep the final stage rocket booster attached to the satellite, allowing the elimination of the pyrotechnics and hardware required to separate the booster. Some sources report that the booster failed to separate in space, but this is not true. Another reason to keep the booster attached to the satellite was to use its telemetry system to send the data collected from Laika’s sensors to Earth. The telemetry system on the satellite itself was maxed out transmitting two different signals to Earth: a steady tone at 40MHZ and a pulsing tone at 20MHZ that was identical to that of Sputnik I. There was no more room in the satellite for a second telemetry system for Laika’s data, so the team had to use the system in the booster. Finally, the team had learned from Sputnik I that the booster was much brighter in orbit than the satellite and so possible to see from the ground. They would leave the booster attached to Sputnik II because, as a November 13, 1957, article in Pravda reports, it “appreciably simplified the task of ascertaining the sputnik’s bearings by means of optical observation.”
What was unclear, however, was how the attached booster would affect the temperature inside Laika’s capsule. The team knew the sun would heat Laika’s capsule from the outside, and the instruments and batteries, as well as Laika herself, would heat it from the inside. To cool Laika’s capsule, the team relied on a forced-air cooling system, insulation, and the satellite’s metal exterior, which would help reflect heat back into space. But the system could not be tested properly on the ground. The only way to know if the system worked was to launch the satellite, with Laika inside, into orbit.
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Sometime before the revolution of agriculture, about 15,000 years before the present, or according to some scholars, even deeper into our ancestral past, 30,000 years, maybe even 100,000 years, the wolf and the human animal came together. Some say it happened first with the Asiatic wolf in present-day China. Others assert it happened among the Natufians of the Upper Jordan Valley in present-day Israel. Or perhaps it happened in several places and times when the human world was inseparable from the world of animals. Wherever and whenever it happened, the wolf and the human animal came together, and we have not been separate since.
The process of domestication is a human enterprise, something human beings do to make use of animals for work and food. “The dog is an animal domesticated,” writes Alexandra Horowitz in Inside of a Dog, “a word that grew from a root form meaning ‘belonging to the house.’ Dogs are animals who belong around houses,” and it was humans who brought them around and brought them in. But domestication is something animals have done to themselves too. We made dogs central to our lives, just as dogs made us central to theirs. “The dog is a member of a human social group,” writes Horowitz, “its natural environment, among people and other dogs.” This has been, as many scholars have noted, a positive arrangement for dogs, which have proliferated in every climate and on every continent, while wolf populations are declining worldwide.
You can imagine the conditions under which the dog came into the house, a world in which a few less aggressive wolves drew close to human camps and picked up scrap meat and bones. Their pups were likewise conditioned to tolerate the presence of humans, and little by little wolves moved into the camps as the people allowed. Tolerant wolves like these living in and around camps with humans would have defended their food source from more aggressive wolves and other animals. At some point humans must have come to understand that these wolves were helpful and, then later, essential to daily life. Over time these wolves became dogs.
Work in exchange for food, maybe shelter too, is the original arrangement between humans and wolves, and when wolves became dogs this agreement remained intact. Over the past 15,000 years, dogs have also been food for humans about as often as they have been fed by us. Only the wealthy and noble classes had the kind of resources to keep dogs as pets, that is, until recently with the rise of a global middle class. Most people throughout human history could afford to keep a dog only for food or work. In making our living, we have used dogs as draught animals, capable of pulling a small cart, sled, or travois; for herding; for guarding property and people; for service in war and police operations; for hunting; for search and rescue; and more recently for therapy and service to people with disabilities. Dogs have performed so many wondrous tasks. In the Middle Ages and for a time after, a breed of short-legged dog was trained to run on a wheel like a hamster. The energy pro
duced by the wheel could be harnessed to turn meat on a spit or churn butter. Such dogs were known as turnspit dogs and were the cornerstone of the modern medieval kitchen.
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In preparation for what she would experience inside Sputnik II, Laika learned to endure confinement for long periods of time. She did not achieve this all at once but rather in a series of small steps. Wearing a restraining suit with attachment rings, she was put into a small capsule and metal restraining chains attached to the rings on her suit. She endured confinement this way for an hour before her trainers released her. The next training session she might spend two hours in the box. Then four. And so on. According to Burgess and Dubbs, the dogs “typically protested with barks and whining when placed in this restrictive space for periods of two to three days.” Laika worked through this discomfort and settled down, which encouraged the team to advance her in the training. Eventually she was able to tolerate confinement in these capsules for up to twenty days. Like the capsule in which she would fly into space, these training capsules habituated Laika to a low-light environment. The only light inside came in through the window.
Inside her capsule, it would be impossible for Laika to get into a squatting position. She would have to do her best in those cramped quarters to eliminate into a waste catchment bag attached to her pelvis and secured by a shoulder harness. “By means of a rubber tube in the receptacle, the animal’s excretions were drained into an airtight ‘latrine’ reservoir,” write Chernov and Yakovlev in their 1959 report “Research on the Flight of a Living Creature in an Artificial Earth Satellite.” “For the purpose of deodorization and the absorption of liquid fractions, the reservoir contained a certain amount of activated carbon and specially dried moss.” This system was unnecessary for brief, suborbital flights but essential for longer duration flights. In training, most space dogs were reluctant to use the waste system. They just didn’t bother to go, and even laxatives were little good in encouraging them. But slowly over time, some of the dogs learned to use the system, and one of those dogs was Laika. In some photos of Laika, you can see the catchment bag attached to her pelvis, hanging down beneath her.
If Laika was going to survive in orbit for seven days on board Sputnik II (the duration of her mission), she would need food and water. In microgravity, dry kibble and canned dog food would float around inside the capsule. “Igor Sergeevich Balakhovsky, who dealt with the problem of dog food in orbital flights, brilliantly solved [this problem],” writes Adil Ravgatovna Kotovskaya of the Institute of Biomedical Problems in her essay “Why Were Flying Dogs Needed for Rockets and Satellites to Launch Yuri Gagarin?” Balakhovsky developed a gelatinous mixture of food and water that would hold together and stick to a feeding tin. Laika and the other space dogs had to be trained to eat this food, because it was not very palatable. Such training probably consisted of introducing Laika to the food a little at a time and also withholding food until she was hungry enough to eat anything.
In the sources I consulted, space dog food is always referenced as providing adequate nutrition and water, but how could this be so? In their 1959 report, Chernov and Yakovlev write that the space dog food was made from “40 percent bread crumbs, 40 percent powdered meat, and 20 percent beef fat” mixed with water and agar to form a “gelatinous substance.” A typical space dog, they report, required no more than 100 grams per day of the pressed food before it was mixed with water and agar. He goes on to say that the space dogs required between 120ml and 200ml of water per day. Presumably then, the formula for space dog food was a mixture of 100 grams of food with upwards of 200ml of water, plus the agar to hold it together. Two hundred milliliters of water weighs 200 grams, so the space dog food was mixed at a ratio of roughly one part food and two parts water.
Let’s concede that 100 grams of pressed food (before the added water) was adequate for a space dog for one day. What about the water? How much water does a dog need in one day? According to veterinarians I’ve worked with, most dogs require a good deal of water, between 15 and 30ml of water per pound of body weight, per day. Laika weighed thirteen pounds, so she would need 195 to 390ml of water per day, depending on activity level and environmental conditions. Based on these numbers, Chernov and Yakovlev’s space dog food meets only the barest minimum requirement for water. A dog can live for two or three days without any water, but by the third day, without emergency medical attention, the dog will surely die.
Instead of supplying adequate food and water, I think the space dog food was barely adequate. After a day or so eating only space dog food, a dog would be dehydrated, and without additional water it would continue on a downward spiral into death, probably within three days.
In Roads to Space, engineer Arkady Ostashov remarks that in a meeting the team discussed installing an automatic feeder in the capsule so that Laika could be fed daily to keep her in good health for as long as possible. But sensitive to reducing the weight of the satellite, Ostashov and other engineers suggested saving “a few kilograms by designing the feeder for one meal only, since [they] were mainly interested in knowing whether the dog would be able to eat at all.” Though the medical staff led by Yazdovsky and Gazenko surely supported feeding Laika once each day, the team opted to follow the engineers’ recommendations. They determined that Laika could survive for up to seven days without much loss of body weight on one feeding of a three-liter ration of space dog food. The food would be available to Laika when she was sealed inside the capsule before launch. What she did with that food was up to her. She could eat it all at once, slowly over time, or not at all. If she ate all the food before launch, the team would not be able to determine if she could eat in microgravity, so they were taking a gamble there. If she waited until after launch to eat the food, since they could not observe her from the ground, the only indication that she could eat in microgravity would be her survival for the duration of the mission, seven days.
Still, by my measure, there was no way for Laika to get enough water from her food to survive for more than about three days, so it really didn’t matter how often or how much food she was given, or if she was given any food at all.
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The mission goal was to keep Laika alive for seven days, keep her alive and transmitting biological data, and after that she would die. By that time her space dog food would be long gone and her oxygen would have run out. She would die, and eventually the satellite would come down too and burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Space dogs had died before on missions, but Laika was the first and only dog sent up without a recovery plan. “They had already resolved themselves to sacrifice a dog,” Dubbs told me, “but only because the order came down [from Khrushchev]. Otherwise they probably would not have launched a dog into orbit until they could retrieve her.” The technology to deorbit a spacecraft and bring it back safely would be developed, and soon, but for this satellite the team would have to take a lot of shortcuts. There was so little time. “The manufacturing of the satellite started,” writes Ivanovsky in The First Steps. “People forgot to rest. The days and nights were passing at the speed of light.”
Imagine your boss, the brilliant and stern Korolev. He says he is under pressure from the premier to get this satellite into orbit, and you, some kind of engineer, are working on a waste catchment system for a dog that is going to die in space no matter what. Or perhaps you are developing food that is completely inadequate to keep a dog alive in space for more than a couple days. To save even more time, why not put the dog into the capsule and send it up with no waste catchment system, no food at all, and no water? Of course, the team was developing and testing systems for future human spaceflight, and the data collected from Laika on the performance of these systems was essential toward that end. But the point was to get that satellite up to celebrate the Bolshevik holiday and beat the Americans again. So why go to all the trouble of a waste system? Why go to all the trouble of developing food that wasn’t going to keep Laika alive?
I think these effor
ts are a testament to the care and respect the scientists and engineers had for the space dogs. They did what they did for science, but also because it was ethical, because it was humane, because the space dogs were their partners and colleagues and deserved to be treated well, as well as possible under the circumstances. The space dogs were teaching them everything they needed to know to achieve human spaceflight, and the team recognized this great debt. “Like their American counterparts they were, in essence, writing the book as they went along—making things up, trying things out, pushing the boundaries of their understanding,” write Burgess and Dubbs. Without the dogs, there would be no new book, there would be no new field of space medicine, there would be no pushing at the boundaries of understanding. The space dogs are the underpinnings of humanity’s exploration of space, our partners and our companions in cosmic exploration. Without the dogs, there would be no spaceflight.
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In 1925 the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a curious novel titled Heart of a Dog. Better known for The Master and Margarita, a novel often cited as one of the great masterpieces of the twentieth century, Bulgakov had abandoned a career as a physician to focus on writing. Indeed, his main character in Heart of a Dog, Philip Philippovich, is a physician, a surgeon more truly, who rescues a stray dog from the Moscow streets by offering it a piece of sausage. The dog, whom he calls Sharik, has been severely burned by a cook who threw boiling water on him as he rooted through the garbage. Upon receiving the sausage, this pathetic, whimpering dog is so happy that he follows Philippovich home. Later Philippovich is asked how he was able to get such a nervous dog to follow him. “By kindness,” he answers. “The only method possible in dealing with living creatures. By terror you cannot get anywhere with an animal, no matter what its stage of development.”