by Kurt Caswell
Inside the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow are two glass cases housing the dead and stuffed space dogs Belka and Strelka. The cases are positioned on either side of the capsule inside which they rode into space. The capsule is dented near the bottom where it impacted the ground. Belka sits on the right side of the capsule with her pointy nose, her mouth in an eerie grin, her toenails too long. Her head is positioned upward and at an angle, so that upon approaching her, she seems to look beyond you, into a distant corner of the ceiling. Strelka, on the left side, is seated too, almost crouched. Her eyes gaze upward as if looking at the person standing over her or perhaps looking at the stars. In Soviet Space Dogs, Turkina writes that likenesses of Belka and Strelka are often positioned this way, “looking toward the heavens” because their “portrait evokes the iconography of the heroic human pilots portrayed in Soviet paintings and posters: always moving upward, always toward the sky.”
During my visit to the museum, I stood for some time before the capsule and the dogs. I had read about them, read the details of their story, and I had looked closely at photographs of the dogs taken before and after their flight. While they were but objects now, preparations of remnant skins, I could sense something of what the dogs had been. They came to life for me in a way that fails a photograph. Standing in their presence, they were no longer lost in a past I had not lived but were part of a present I was now living. Somehow, standing there, I felt closer to Laika too, who had gone out of this world and come back into it, both times in a blaze. Like me, Laika had been separated from Belka and Strelka by time, even if only a few years. Yet the way time pools in such a moment in the presence of the dead, you can believe without proof that the threshold of time, both into the past and into the future, is possible to reach across.
After Laika, Belka and Strelka are the most famous space dogs of the Soviet program. They achieved what Lisichika and Chaika did not: they became the first living beings to orbit the Earth and be recovered safely. They proved that the life-support systems on the Vostok and the newly developed hardware for deorbiting a spacecraft worked, and that the USSR now possessed the technology and know-how to put the first human being into space.
Belka (Squirrel) weighed just twelve pounds and measured eighteen inches long and twelve inches tall. She was nearly all white but for her sides and short, stiff ears, which were tinted yellow. Belka’s broad, stout-looking head distinguished her from Strelka (Little Arrow), who was more gracile, leaner and longer, though she too weighed twelve pounds. Strelka’s head, back, and sides were marked by dark brown patches, and her ears look softer, more pliable, which gave her an amiable countenance. In some photographs, Strelka’s ears are laid back or bent down but not floppy like a yellow lab’s. In publicity photos and on TV, Belka typically wore a red flight suit while Strelka wore green. Belka had originally been called Albina (though she is not the same Albina who was Laika’s second for Sputnik II), and Strelka had been named Marquise. Turkina reports that it was the commander-in-chief of the Strategic Missile Force, Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, who thought the names too French, too bourgeois, and so directed the team to give the dogs strong Russian names.
With the success of their flight, the world fell in love with Belka and Strelka. Their images were widely published. They made radio and TV appearances and were trotted out for display before crowds of citizens and dignitaries. They were featured in newspaper and magazine stories, and their tale of heroism was retold in children’s books and more recently in animated films. Like Laika, their images were fashioned into porcelain figurines and appeared on stamps, ornamental wooden boxes, confectionery tins and chocolate boxes, badges, postcards, cartoons, you name it. Fan mail poured in. There was no pop culture in the Soviet Union in those days. “Under socialism the niche occupied by popular culture in capitalist society was subject to strict ideological control,” Turkina writes. “Paradoxically, Belka and Strelka became the first Soviet pop stars.”
In 1961 Van Cliburn came again to Moscow to perform, for he so loved the city and the nation. While he was recording a live performance at the Shabolovka broadcasting center, Belka and Strelka were featured TV guests in a nearby sound studio. Wily little things that they were, the two dogs escaped their handlers and scurried off through the hallways of the building. “We were at the Shabolovka studios where they were filming the dogs,” said Institute of Aviation Medicine biologist Ludmilla Radkevich in an interview in Space Dogs. “The cameraman said: ‘Could they bark a bit? Make them bark. Do something for the cameras.’ But the dogs just sat quietly until one of the cameramen dropped something. Then the dogs jumped up and ran right out of the studio.” The two dogs slipped through a doorway and found themselves on stage with Van Cliburn. The great pianist recognized the dogs immediately and interrupted his concert to welcome them. “He was so delighted and happy he couldn’t believe his luck,” said Radkevich.
Van Cliburn posed for photographs holding the dogs. In one photo, he holds the dogs close against his chest, Belka in his right hand, Strelka in his left, a happy smile on his face, the studio lights putting a shine on his always-perfect hair. In Soviet Space Dogs, Turkina states that the incident made the evening news, the American prodigy poised in awe and admiration of the Soviet space dog heroes. The moment is a giant among the many instances of what the Soviet PR machine called “Victories of Soviet Science for the Sake of the Entire Human Race.”
Belka, who had already flown three times, and Strelka, who had never flown, made their historic flight on August 19, 1960. The team prepped the two dogs, attaching sensors to monitor heart rate and respiration. Their orbital flight was scheduled to last twenty-four hours, so their space suits included a waste management system, and their capsule, a food dispenser. Sensors allowed the ground crew to monitor the air quality inside the capsule, its carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor levels, while TV cameras monitored the dogs in real time. Also along for the ride: rats, mice, insects, fungi, various plants and sprouts of wheat, peas, onions, and corn, and, according to some sources, a rabbit.
The team watched the video stream of the dogs in the capsule as the R-7 rocket lifted off. Belka and Strelka were pinned down by the g-force of acceleration. They looked almost dead, or dying, it was hard to tell. Their heart rate and respiration rose dramatically, even tripling, which let the team know the dogs were still alive but obviously in distress. And then the spacecraft entered orbit and that soft elevation of microgravity collapsed over them. Their vital signs normalized. They began to stir, to move inside the capsule a little, and then Belka started barking. The team on the ground could not hear her, as the microphones they installed were only able to detect the background noise inside the spacecraft, but they could see her. She struggled and barked in that weird absence of gravity, nothing like the environment her body had evolved in. So she barked. A dog barking in space. The spacecraft came around the Earth for the fourth time, and Belka vomited. That done, she settled down and seemed to accept what was happening to her. As her body adjusted to microgravity, she went along with the ride. There was nothing else she could do.
It’s likely that Belka’s distress and vomiting were caused by what researchers now call space adaptation syndrome, the effect of moving rapidly from the hypergravity environment of launch to the microgravity environment of space. This shift causes an increase in cranial pressure, which can lead to headache, vertigo, a general feeling of malaise, and vomiting. The condition affects about 50 percent of all astronauts who fly in space. Yazdovsky and his team were observing these effects for the first time and acknowledged that there were just too many unknowns about microgravity. They recommended the first human in orbit make no more than one trip around. The recommendation held, and this is precisely what Gagarin did.
After eighteen orbits in a period of some twenty-five hours, the spacecraft carrying Belka and Strelka made its reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. The capsule the dogs rode in was ejected from the spacecraft and came down under a braking chute. It l
anded off course in the steppe near the Russian city of Orsk at the southern tip of the Ural Mountains, that great sweep of temperate grassland where, some six thousand years ago, the horse was first domesticated, revolutionizing the way we live and work, hunt and fight. The recovery team found the capsule and opened it. Inside were Belka and Strelka in perfect condition. Once released from their restraining harnesses, the two dogs ran about the search and recovery team barking and leaping into the air.
Belka and Strelka were interviewed on Radio Moscow and put on display at a press conference at the Academy of Sciences. In a now-famous photograph, Gazenko holds the two dogs aloft, one in each hand, the look of triumph in his smile and eyes, a lighted candelabra in the foreground. There was no doubt, in that moment, that Belka and Strelka’s success would not have been possible without Laika’s death.
In November of that year, Strelka gave birth to a litter of six puppies sired by Pushok, a space dog who never flew. Khrushchev gave one of the pups, Pushinka (Fluffy), as a gift to America’s first family, the Kennedys. Pushinka was a gift of political and cultural goodwill, but also a kind of gloat: see what the Soviet Union has achieved! Before joining the Kennedy family in the White House, Pushinka endured a thorough inspection, which included X-rays, to make certain she was not bugged or surgically implanted with some explosive device. Little Pushinka, the Russian debutante, later fell in love with one of the Kennedys’ dogs, Charlie. They had a litter of pups, American-Soviet mutts the Kennedys named Butterfly, Streaker, White-tips, and Blackie. President Kennedy called them pupniks.
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With the flight of Belka and Strelka, the space dog program was coming to a close. The Soviets knew it would not be long before they sent a man into space, and then the kind of work the dogs were doing to test life support and recovery systems would not be needed anymore. This was not, of course, the end of biological and medical research in space using animals. Such research is ongoing, but cosmonauts would soon become both scientist and test subject. Another factor pushing the end of the space dog program was a growing criticism by both animal rights organizations and the general public. People just didn’t want to hear news of flying dogs, and especially news of those dogs dying. Fruit flies? Mice? Fungi? No problem. But dogs, the animal we love best, our companions and friends? Too cruel. Not ethical. Inhuman.
Mukha (Little Fly) and Pchelka (Little Bee), along with guinea pigs, rats, mice, fruit flies, and some plants, lifted off on December 1, 1960, aboard Sputnik IV for a flight that was to last one day in orbit. Mukha had already had two near misses on her life: she had been passed over for Laika’s doomed mission, and she nearly died during her three-day test of Laika’s capsule. Now she was going to risk it all again. During the flight, TV cameras onboard the spacecraft broadcast a signal back to Mission Control at eighty-three megacycles. The CIA demodulated the signal and watched footage of the two dogs during their flight. It was becoming harder and harder for both the US and the USSR to keep their programs, and their technology, secret from each other. When the spacecraft reentered Earth’s atmosphere, the retro-rocket, designed to slow and guide its trajectory, malfunctioned. It fired and kept firing, and it would not shut down, sending the spacecraft far off course. Mission Control was no longer in control, and it looked like Mukha and Pchelka would land outside the Soviet Union. To avoid a foreign government getting ahold of their spacecraft and their dogs, Mission Control destroyed it with a remote self-destruct feature, sending a fiery trail across the sky. Both dogs were killed.
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December 22, 1960. The pilot of an Anton-2 aircraft sent a radio message to Arvid Pallo, head of the space dog search and recovery team: “I can see a sphere with two openings. There is also a parachute,” he said.
Pallo and a colleague boarded a helicopter and flew to the crash site, about sixty kilometers west of a town called Tura, in far Siberia. It was late in the day, and at this latitude in winter, daylight lasted only six hours. Pallo opted to risk getting caught in the dark and cold because if he couldn’t find the spacecraft and disarm its self-destruct system, it was going to blow up, taking the two dogs—Shutka (Joke) and Kometa (Comet)—with it. When the helicopter landed, Pallo and his colleague jumped out, sinking into waist-deep snow. Unsure which direction to go, they soon lost their way. The big Anton-2 cruised by again, the pilot warning that everyone needed to get back to the base. It was getting dark, and the temperature was dropping. The helicopter pilot would have trouble navigating in this unfamiliar landscape at night.
“I used my radio to [ask] … the An-2 pilot to show us the way by flying along a straight line from the helicopter to the spacecraft,” Pallo said in an interview for Roads to Space. The pilot did so, and Pallo and his colleague set off in that direction. Arriving at the downed spacecraft, dark and cold coming in against them, Pallo and his colleague had to work fast.
The launch of Shutka and Kometa had gone well, but at the edge of space the third stage of the rocket malfunctioned and failed to push the spacecraft into orbit. Emergency systems kicked in, and the spacecraft separated from the rocket at 133 miles altitude. The team assumed the spacecraft and the two dogs, along with some mice, insects, and plants, would be destroyed when the self-destruct system detected its anomalous trajectory, but it didn’t. On the descent, the capsule carrying the two dogs should have been jettisoned from the main spacecraft and come down under its own braking chute. That didn’t happen either. On the way down, the dogs hit 20g, a crushing force that could kill them, and landed near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, where in 1908 an asteroid or a comet struck the Earth, destroying two thousand square kilometers of taiga forest. The so-called Tunguska Event remains the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history and has been the subject of many UFO conspiracies.
If the dogs had survived the descent and landing, they were not yet safe. The self-destruct system that failed to detonate during flight had a backup timer: the spacecraft would blow up in sixty hours unless the system was disarmed. There it sat in the snow and ice of the Siberian winter, the dogs inside, the timer ticking.
In Roads to Space, Pallo said he volunteered to approach the spacecraft first and try to disarm it. “Go and stand behind a tree while I go up to the spacecraft and disable the self-destruct system,” Pallo told his colleague.
The man refused. “This is my system,” he said.
“I’ll go,” Pallo said, “because I’m the leader of the group.”
Again the man refused.
The timer ticking, the two men used matches to draw lots. Pallo lost.
There in the taiga forest, darkness coming on, the temperature at –40 degrees Celsius, Pallo watched from behind the protection of a tree as his colleague approached the spacecraft. The man set to work disarming the self-destruct system, calling out each of the steps to Pallo. The work came along easily, efficiently, and then it was done. But as the dogs’ capsule had not ejected from the spacecraft, that system was still armed, as were some of the pyrotechnics from the parachute deployment system. Either could explode and kill the dogs as well as the two men. This time Pallo would do the work while his colleague stood behind a tree. Pallo reached inside the rocket’s interior to disarm the system, but his heavy winter gear made it impossible for him to get his arm far enough inside. He removed his coat. As he strained to reach the connector, the spacecraft shifted. “It was anyone’s guess what might happen next,” Pallo said.
What happened next was that Pallo reached the connector and pulled it free. Now to free the dogs.
“We tried to see the dogs through the portholes,” Pallo said, “but the glass was covered with hoarfrost which had built up during the days and nights since the spacecraft was first spotted. We knocked on the walls of the container but heard no signs of life inside.” Night was coming on. The helicopter sat waiting, its rotors still turning, burning fuel to keep the engine warm, the pilot beckoning to the men. Come on. We do not have much time. We must leave now. Pallo and his colleague left the
dogs, Shutka and Kometa, inside the sealed capsule and returned to Tura. If they were alive at all, they would have to endure another long cold night.
Arriving back at Tura, Korolev called Pallo on his radio frequency phone twice, asking for an update on the condition of the dogs and the spacecraft. “As I began to describe our ordeal,” Pallo said, “the aurora borealis appeared and cut off our radio communication.” The aurora borealis, or northern lights, have been known to disrupt radio and telegraph communication, but they sometimes act as a kind of power source for such equipment. In the so-called Great Geomagnetic Storm of 1859, a mass solar ejection supercharged the telegraph lines between Boston and Portland, Maine. Operators on either end were able to continue their transmissions with their power systems switched off. But that was not the case on this night. Pallo was cut off, and he had not yet told Korolev that he didn’t know if the dogs were alive.
The next morning Pallo returned to the spacecraft accompanied by a veterinarian. If the dogs were alive, they would likely be in poor condition after three nights in such cold temperatures. Perhaps the veterinarian could help save them. As the two men removed the capsule from the spacecraft, they could hear the dogs barking. Pallo opened the hatch to find Shutka and Kometa looking up at him. The veterinarian removed his sheepskin coat, wrapped the dogs inside, and carried them to the waiting helicopter.
Later, Oleg Gazenko adopted Kometa, and she lived out her life in his family home.
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A little later in China, in 1966, a young male dog named Xiao Bao (Little Leopard) flew into space, followed by a female, Shan Shan (Coral), a couple weeks later. Both landed safely and were returned to the care of their handlers. China had been working with Russian scientists to get its rocket program off the ground so they could conduct biological and medical research. Xiao Bao and Shan Shan were part of that research, along with mice, rats, and fruit flies. But according to Burgess and Dubbs, there is some evidence that instead of biological research, the end game was to use the rockets to take atmospheric samples following a series of high-altitude nuclear tests. China has a long history of shooting stuff into the sky, as it is credited with inventing fireworks in the second century BCE. It was the Mongols, however, and the tribes of the Middle East that brought these protorockets, and so gunpowder, to the West, where it was adapted immediately for warfare.