by Kurt Caswell
A week later Dezik flew again into space, this time with a dog named Lisa, Russian for “fox.” The rocket went up, the spacecraft came down, but this time no white chute appeared above the horizon. The spacecraft kept falling until the Earth came up hard beneath it. Reports say that a pressure sensor damaged by the vibration of the rocket engines prevented the braking chute from deploying, a mechanical failure that killed both dogs.
When Anatoli Blagonravov (1895–1975), the head of the Commission for the Investigation of the Upper Atmosphere, heard about the death of Dezik and Lisa, he grieved deeply. Blagonravov would later become a towering figure in the Soviet space program. Among other achievements, he was instrumental in negotiating the 1972 agreement between the US and the Soviet Union that called for the development of spacecraft built by the two nations that would be capable of docking with each other. The 1975 Apollo/Soyuz Test Project (known as Soyuz/Apollo in Russia) is often cited as the end of the Space Race and so the beginning of cooperation in space between the US and USSR. But that hallmark event was still down the road. Blagonravov was crushed by the death of Lisa and Dezik, especially Dezik. He could not stand to think of Tsygan, Dezik’s former flight mate, flying again and maybe dying in a crash too. He announced to the team that Tsygan would retire and then promptly adopted her. According to Yazdovsky, Tysgan lived a long and easy life in Blagonravov’s Moscow home.
You might imagine them—this man so central to the Soviet space program and this little dog, one of the first in space—taking long lovely walks through the Moscow streets, maybe into Gorky Park, passing by the public fountains there, and the many people at their leisure.
¤
Ryzhik (Ginger) and Smelaya (Courageous) were scheduled to fly out of Kapustin Yar on August 19, 1951. The day before launch, Smelaya cut loose from her handlers during her walk and ran off into the barren steppe. She bore similar markings as Tysgan (now living happily in retirement in Moscow), white with black patches over her eyes and much of her face. Her ears stood up, giving her the distinct look of a dog close to her wild ancestors. Out there in the steppe where Smelaya was last seen running, her wild ancestors waited for her, the golden jackal, an opportunist that would happily prey on a wayward space dog. Still, it was not unheard of for dogs to carouse with jackals, as hybrid jackal-dogs too roamed the desert. Summer temperatures might be hot during the day, but it would cool off at night. Still, the team came to understand that it was unlikely Smelaya would return. It was bad enough to lose her to the desert, but what complicated matters further was that space dogs were selected in compatible pairs for their flight missions. How would they find a replacement on short notice?
The next morning, launch day, Smelaya walked back into Kapustin Yar as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. Where had she been? What had she been doing? How did she make it through the dangerous night? Whatever the answers, the team prepped and dressed her for flight, she flew, and she was recovered safely. Smelaya is likely the only dog in history to spend a night with jackals and fly into space the next morning.
¤
Yazdovsky chose a dog named Neputevyy (Screw Up) and another named Bobik to fly on September 3, 1951. Like Smelaya, Bobik escaped from her handlers on a preflight walk and vanished into the steppe. The previous return of Smelaya gave the team some hope, but Bobik did not return and they were out of time. As the flight schedule demanded a replacement dog, Yazdovsky ordered that one be found. A lab technician suggested they fly one of the many stray dogs hanging around the mess hall at Kapustin Yar. The team agreed that this was not a bad idea. “So I put on a raincoat and off we went,” Seryapin said in the film Space Dogs. “We caught one of the dogs, about the same size as the runaway. We brought him in, washed, fed, and brushed him. [It isn’t certain whether the dog was male or if Seryapin is defaulting to the masculine pronoun.] We tried the sensors on him. The dog was absolutely calm. While we worked on him, he licked our hands. He was a very calm dog.” Even so, this calm dog had no training at all, and the team worried the flight alone might mean his death.
The rocket went up and came down just fine, and what about the dogs? “I looked into the hatch,” Seryapin said. “You know, I think my heart missed a beat. Both dogs were alive, and the new dog was absolutely calm.… When [Korolev] saw I was holding the new dog, he asked, ‘But which dog is this? Where did it come from? Why have I not seen it before? What’s its name?’” Seryapin explained what had happened. “Korolev petted the dogs as he always did,” Seryapin said, “and then he said, ‘Remember comrades that a time will come when our trade unions will offer ordinary people holidays in space. Well, here’s the first one.’” And he held the dog up in triumph.
Korolev named that dog ZIB (a Russian acronym for Zamena Ischeznuvshevo Bobik, or “the replacement for disappeared Bobik”). Blagonravov, perhaps much impressed by ZIB, took him home too, where he lived in happy retirement with Tysgan.
¤
On June 26, 1954, Lisa 2 (Fox) and Ryzhik 2 (Ginger) flew into space. Both dogs were recovered alive, but this flight, and the next eight flights, included some major changes. First, the program had been making improvements to the rockets, which were now more reliable and more powerful. Second, the recovery system, one of the weaknesses of the first series of dog flights, had changed. The braking chutes sometimes failed, resulting in two dead dogs. Even when the braking chutes did work and the dogs were recovered, the team sometimes found blood spattered on the inside of the capsule walls and coming from the noses and anuses of the dogs. A dog named Damka flew twice in the same week, and the team found hemorrhaging from her eyes. These dogs recovered, but the team came to understand that the g-force associated with braking was taking a toll on the dogs.
In this next series of flights, instead of flying in a sealed capsule, the dogs would wear a pressurized space suit with a helmet and ride in a protective metal framework, or chassis, that would be ejected from the spacecraft at different altitudes during the descent to the ground. The flights would go like this: the rocket would ascend to an apex altitude of sixty-two miles, the very edge of space. Here the nosecone of the rocket would separate from its booster. On its descent, the first dog would be ejected at fifty miles altitude, and the chute would open at about forty-seven miles altitude, giving it a long, mostly gentle ride back to Earth. The nosecone would continue to fall, and at twenty-eight miles altitude the second dog would be ejected. Its chute would not open until about two miles altitude, leaving the dog to freefall for a full twenty-six miles, straight down. The chute on the nosecone itself would open before that, at about four miles altitude.
For the first time, telemetry would be used to relay information to the ground crew, especially the space dogs’ heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, and urine output, if any, as well as the temperature inside the space suit. The oxygen supply was to last two hours, and at 12,000 feet the dog would move off the bottled oxygen when a valve opened to allow breathable air to flow into the helmet.
¤
Despite steady improvements, rocket flight was dangerous, and a number of space dogs died. Lisa 2 (Fox) flew again on July 26, 1954, before she was killed in a flight on February 5, 1955. Her partner on the flight, Bulba, was also killed. Fox was an all-white dog with longer, soft-looking fur and a friendly face. File photos show her right ear standing tall while her left ear is cocked to the side. She was a favorite of Alexander Seryapin, and reciprocally he was a favorite of hers. “When [Fox] went about with [her] guard it was best to keep your distance,” Seryapin said in Space Dogs, “otherwise the guard would snap at your trouser legs.” The team around Kapustin Yar laughed about that, such a little dog with a big bite, always guarding Seryapin. Annoying sometimes, sure, but endearing too. Then “a time came when I had to put Fox into her space suit and send her on a flight,” Seryapin said. “I was well aware an animal shooting up to a height of 110 kilometers doesn’t bear the stress so well. So I put Fox into the [spacecraft] so she could see the Earth while descendi
ng from 90 kilometers. Unfortunately the rocket veered to one side, and when the rocket tried to correct itself there was a sharp jolt that threw Fox out of the [spacecraft] into the atmosphere in her space suit. The jolt was so strong that the animal was dead before she fell to Earth.”
The program’s secrecy forbade memorials for the dogs, but Seryapin defied this regulation to bury Fox in the wild steppe. He photographed her gravesite. Did he intend to return one day to honor her, to sit beside the little mound of her tucked up against a hummock in the shade of a saxaul thicket? Did he intend to steal away from his barracks in the night to visit her, his silhouette on a hilltop dune going over it, and off into the empty lands, the bark of golden jackals coming up for him out of the distance? Did he have words to say when he laid her in?
¤
Spaceflight and exploration were the greatest challenges in aviation medicine, and naturally the field attracted some of the best scientific minds. In summer 1956 medical doctor Oleg Gazenko joined Yazdovsky’s space dog team at the Institute of Aviation Medicine. A thin man with a neat mustache and sharpened nose, Gazenko had worked for the Soviet air force during World War II. After the war, he began to work on the issues that affect pilots at high altitude. The military had just constructed a larger, more powerful rocket, the R-2, which could boost heavier payloads to higher altitudes. Instead of just sending dogs to the edge of space (62 miles), the R-2 would take them to an altitude of at least 130 miles. The dogs had to be better trained, and Gazenko was one of the men who would train them.
To learn as much as he could, Gazenko made a trip to the circus to speak with animal trainers, likely the Old Moscow Circus on Tsvetnoy Boulevard. As one of the oldest circuses in Russia, trainers at the Old Moscow Circus would have been well acquainted with the methods of the famed Durov family. Vladimir Durov (1863–1934) was long dead, but his training methodology and legacy lived on in his family and others who worked with circus animals. Durov was widely known in the Soviet Union as the man who revolutionized animal training by using kindness and love instead of force and punishment. His “elevated status is based on his reputation as a friend to all animals and as an operator who used kindness to make them do his bidding,” writes Henrietta Mondry in Political Animals: Representing Dogs in Modern Russian Culture. “Indeed, Durov is the father of a humane method of animal training. His brand of education using love and patience … has produced extraordinary results.” Of all animals, Durov loved dogs best and regarded “them as his friends, and the animal closest to human beings,” writes Mondry. “For Durov, the correlation between humans and dogs was an established fact.”
Korolev and Yazdovsky had embraced a humane approach to training space dogs from the beginning, and now Gazenko would refine it. One of the initial concerns about using dogs to test life-support systems for spacecraft was their individual natures, that no two dogs were exactly alike. This meant, for example, that one dog’s reaction to g-force loads would not necessarily be the same as another. For this reason the team flew two dogs at a time, so that their responses might be compared. In designing their training, Gazenko assessed each dog’s personality and trained her accordingly. “We were more interested in preflight training than in biological experiments,” Gazenko said in an interview with the Smithsonian in 1989. “Instead of concentrating on the body, we were more interested in the creature itself, the dog’s personality. So we observed their behavior and perhaps learned the principles we used later in the selection and training of cosmonauts.” In all my reading, I found little attention to this key detail. Not only did the space dogs test the hardware required to make human space travel possible, but they also helped develop the training regimens, along with an understanding of the personality traits crucial to becoming a cosmonaut. Dogs and humans achieved spaceflight together.
Along with the animal training methods of the Durov family, Pavlov’s development of respondent conditioning is deeply seated in the way the Soviets worked with animals, not as a policy so much but as a culture. Instead of punishing the space dogs to get them to perform or not perform, the Soviets created an environment where the dogs performed willingly. Respondent conditioning, which Pavlov famously refined using dogs, pairs what is known as a potent stimulus (food, for example) with a neutral stimulus (a bell). When the bell rings, the dog gets food. Since food generally elicits salivation in dogs, and the dog comes to associate the bell with food, soon the dog will salivate upon hearing the bell. No food is required.
Alongside Pavlov’s respondent conditioning is American psychologist B. F. Skinner’s (1904–1990) operant conditioning; taken together they give us the principles of behaviorism. Operant conditioning is divided into two branches: one for reinforcing a behavior, which is to increase it, the other for punishing a behavior, which is to decrease it. Both branches include options for positive and negative stimuli.
To increase Ham’s success at the control panel, American trainers used negative stimuli (electric shock). To avoid this shock, the chimps learned to operate the levers correctly. Such a training method can be effective, and it was in the case of the space chimps. While Dittmer tells us that the chimps were well cared for in their living quarters and during training, it is interesting to consider the reward-based training of the Soviets next to the punishment-based training of the Americans. What does this difference mean next to the American belief that the Soviets were cruel and godless, a nation built on the foundation of Stalin’s terrifying reign? Is it appropriate to regard the USSR as a nation of people controlled by punishment, while its research animals performed for reward; and the US as a country where those roles are reversed? If so, what does this say about human empathy? Which path is an expression of empathy, if either is at all? At the risk of sentimentality, if the Soviets used love to train their space dogs, then a trained space dog, like Laika, completed her daily work not out of the threat of being punished but out of love.
¤
In 1955 the Soviets began construction of a new spaceport in Kazakhstan about five hundred miles east of Kapustin Yar, at the edge of the Kyzl Kum desert. This new, modern facility—now known as Baikonur Cosmodrome—was the largest spaceport in the world, and it remains so to this day. All crewed missions launched from present-day Russia fly out of Baikonur, including those carrying American astronauts. It was here that the team tested and perfected the R-7 rocket, the world’s first ICBM, the rocket that carried Sputnik I, Sputnik II and Laika, and the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit. Baikonur was built in part to accommodate the R-7 rocket. It was just too big and powerful to be launched from Kapustin Yar. And so successful was the R-7 that the Soviets used its basic design as the foundation for a whole family of rockets. To date, more R-7 rockets have been launched than any other comparable family of rockets in the world. The spaceport is known colloquially as Gagarin’s Start, but it is also sometimes called Tyuratam because it is close to the village of Tyuratam. In time, a town grew up out of the desert to serve the spaceport, and it was named Leninsk. In 1995 President Boris Yeltsin changed the town’s name from Leninsk to Baikonur.
Like Kapustin Yar, Baikonur was a desolate place—cold, wind-battered, and isolated. It was about as far from the glamor and beauty of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre or Leningrad’s Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood as a man could get. Yet it was also a place of great activity, energy, and excitement, as some of the world’s most secret and most advanced technologies were being developed and tested here. Not long after the spaceport’s completion, the R-7 rocket carrying Laika shattered the morning quiet, marking a major turning point in Soviet, and world, space exploration. From that moment forward, rockets and their spacecraft would no longer be flown solely to the edge of space but into Earth orbit and, following that, to the moon, and then deeper and deeper into our solar system.
¤
Some three years after Laika’s flight, Lisichika (Little Fox) and Chaika (Seagull) were scheduled for an orbital test flight on an R-7 rocket in the prototype of the new
Vostok spacecraft. The flight, scheduled for July 28, 1960, was a critical test of the Vostok, which in about a year’s time would take Yuri Gagarin into orbit. Khrushchev had explained to Korolev that he would be held personally responsible if an American astronaut was first into space. You can imagine what was riding on these two little dogs: Korolev’s reputation and place in the pantheon of Soviet heroes, the space dog and the rocket program itself, and the world’s regard for the power and position of the Soviet Union. In effect, everything.
Korolev, the man whose keen focus and hard edges were legendary, whom most of his engineers and scientists feared, kept a quiet fondness for Lisichika. She was one of his favorites. How this unfolded we can only imagine. Perhaps it arose from a singular incident when Lisichika was first brought into the kennels and needed someone. Perhaps Korolev gave her food and water on one of his morning rounds, and she gave him a wagging dance and a soft look about her eyes, which softened him. Or perhaps over time she warmed to him, and he to her. We cannot know. Despite his fondness for Lisichika, Korolev regarded her as a highly trained space dog, a working animal. She was not a pet. In fact, his love for her may have stemmed, in part, from what she could do for him, what she could do for the Soviet Union. The investment in her had to be returned to the program and to the country, and so she would have to fly. On the day that Lisichika was scheduled to fly, Korolev bent to her ear and whispered: “It is my deepest desire that you come back safely.”
Waiting on the launchpad inside the capsule, Lisichika and Chaika felt the vibration and storm of the engines igniting, their burning roar, readying to lift that rocket into space. In that critical moment, as the team waited for the rocket and the dogs in which their lives were so invested to rise into the heavens, a strap-on booster broke loose and fell away. The rocket exploded on the launchpad. Both dogs were killed.
¤