Laika's Window

by Kurt Caswell

  These early rocket trials with dogs in China led to the Shenzhou Program that put the first Chinese taikonaut, Yang Liwei, into orbit on October 15, 2003. To test the life-support systems of the spacecraft, the Chinese sent up Shenzhou 2 in 2001 carrying a rabbit, a monkey, and a dog. In his memoirs, The Nine Levels between Heaven and Earth, Yang Liwei writes that not only has China flown dogs in space, but Chinese taikonauts eat dog in space. And not just any dog, but Huajiang dog from Guangdong Province in the south of China, touted for its nutritional benefits. In fact, popular belief in Huajiang is that local dog meat is better for one’s health and strength than the super root ginseng. Despite eating dog, Yang Liwei notes, Chinese taikonauts eat “quite normal food” in space. An article in the UK’s Telegraph reports that items on the menu aboard Chinese spacecraft include lotus root porridge, hairy crab with ginger, eel with green pepper, and baby cuttlefish casserole.

  ¤

  In early 1961 the Soviet team settled on two dog flights as a final test of the Vostok spacecraft before they sent a human being into space. “The aim was to test the entire Vostok system,” said Yazdovsky in Roads to Space, “including the space suit, the ejection seat, and the life support facility.” On March 9 a dog named Chernuska (Blackie) made one orbit with a wooden mannequin the team called Ivan Ivanovich. Also on the flight were forty gray mice, forty white mice, forty black mice, guinea pigs, reptiles, human blood, cancer cells, plant seeds, various microbes, and fermentation agents. American and British scientists called the flight “a veritable Noah’s Ark,” Yazdovsky said, “carrying all the species represented on Darwin’s evolutionary scale.” Ivan Ivanovich wore the orange SK-1 pressure suit that the first cosmonaut would wear, and some of the biological experiments—mice, guinea pigs, microorganisms—were stowed in his chest cavity and abdomen, his hips and thighs. He rode in the ejection seat to test that system because the first cosmonaut was going to bail out and come down under a parachute. Ivan Ivanovich was like Pinocchio: not quite a man but not quite a mannequin either. The little black space dog, Chernuska, rode with the remaining biological experiments in the pressurized capsule. Most of the space dogs were white or mostly white, so Chernuska was a rarity by her coloring, along with Mishka (Little Bear), who was killed on her second flight in 1951, and Malyshka (Little One) who flew in 1955 and 1956 and was recovered both times.

  Burgess and Dubbs tell the story of one of the members of the medical staff, Dr. Abram Genin, who, against regulations, strapped his old Pobeda wristwatch to Chernushka’s leg as he helped prep her for the flight. After graduating from the military academy, Genin received the watch as a gift and now wanted to get rid of it. He tried to break it with hard use—swimming with it in the sea, dropping it on the floor. The watch kept on ticking. As Chernushka was loaded into the capsule, he strapped it to her leg “hoping he’d never see it again,” he said in a 1989 interview with the Smithsonian. Did he think the rocket might explode or the dog would be lost in the Siberian wilderness? Did he have so little confidence in the rocket and the Vostok spacecraft? In Chernushka?

  Ivan Ivanovich ejected from the spacecraft and Chernushka came down in the capsule, both landing in Siberia far to the east of Baikonur. Yazdovsky led the search and recovery team with a general named Nikolai Kamanin. It was snowing, and the wind stirred the snow, reducing visibility. According to Burgess and Dubbs, the team flew into a remote town, then traveled by truck as far as they could go, tracking Chernushka’s capsule. Somewhere along the route they acquired horses and rode in through hard country to the landing site near the town of Zainsk, Tatarstan. Locals had seen parachutes descending from the sky, then found a strange capsule on the ground, and farther off they could see what appeared to be a man in an orange flight suit lying unresponsive in a field. They wondered if he was a foreign spy and why he wasn’t moving. Maybe he was dead. The rescue team arrived, ignored the man in the field, and saved the dog, which emerged from the capsule wearing that watch. The team held her up for the fascinated crowd to see, the dog that had just flown in space.

  Later the team tracked the watch back to Genin and returned it to him. “He was still wearing the watch at the time of the interview in 1989,” write Burgess and Dubbs, proving it was nearly indestructible.

  Upon her death, Chernushka’s body was stuffed and put on display in the museum at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow. In 2011 the schoolchildren of Zainsk held a contest to design a memorial to Chernushka, whose story was legendary in the town. “The resulting monument features the trajectory of a spaceship looping around the Earth,” writes Turkina in Soviet Space Dogs, “with Chernushka’s head juxtaposed against it, proudly gazing skyward.”

  Ivan Ivanovich made a second flight on March 25, 1961, this time with Zvezdochka (Little Star), a white ragamuffin of a dog, hardly a dog at all, with dark ears and a dark patch around her right eye. She was given her name by Gagarin, who was present at the launch and would soon be launched himself. This time the team wrote the word maket (dummy) on Ivan Ivanovich’s forehead. The pair rode into orbit and made one revolution of the Earth, and on the way back Ivan Ivanovich ejected while Zvezdochka rode down in the capsule. Both were recovered safely.

  ¤

  In spring 1961 the young Soviet air force officer, Yuri Gagarin, became the first man in space, making one orbit of the Earth in a Vostok spacecraft. Flying high above the planet, he crossed over the United States, over Africa, and over miles of blue ocean. From the window of his spacecraft, he gazed on the splendor of the Earth. “It’s beautiful,” he later said. “What beauty!” On his descent, when Vostok reached about 23,000 feet altitude, Gagarin ejected as planned and rode down under an orange parachute. Hanging in the sky, he could see the great Volga River of his native land, a field camp in the countryside, and some women tending a calf. He landed on his feet in a plowed field near the town of Engels, about 700 miles north and east of the Baikonur Cosmodrome where he had started his journey, where Laika before him had started hers. Dragging his chute behind him, he walked to the top of a hill and saw a woman and a young girl approaching. Gagarin was still a man, but too, he was something more: a cosmonaut, and the very first. When they noticed him, the woman slowed and hesitated. Frightened, the girl ran away. “I’m one of yours, a Soviet,” Gagarin yelled after them. “Don’t be afraid.” He walked up to the woman and explained that he had come from outer space, and he needed to find a telephone to call Moscow.

  ¤

  Gagarin is immensely important as the man who went first, but before him were the animals, the fruit flies and rabbits and cats, the fungi and fish and spiders, the chimpanzees, and the space dogs, with Laika as their ambassador. What is it one makes of these events? How are we to understand the many trials and accidents and sufferings of the animals flown into space, their sacrifices, the physical proof that they could withstand the rigors of a rocket launch, the reentry of a spacecraft, life in a confined capsule, the unknowns of microgravity, bombardment by high-energy cosmic particles. What does all this mean to us, for us, about us? What does it mean that we use animals for our own designs, our own purposes, to improve human life, for wealth and power? What does it mean that we sacrifice them instead of ourselves?

  Animals advance us. Their fantastic achievements become our achievements. Our civilization, on which rests the advancement of our technologies, from agriculture to computers to space-faring, would not be possible without animals. But we do not own the animals of the Earth. They are not here for us alone. They are beings in their own right, and this is how we should think of them. We use animals to learn, and we learn from animals, but they belong to themselves. It is as if the storehouse of human knowledge was given to us by the animals, and sometimes at great expense to them. When animals die in service to us, I think it takes something from us, some piece of our humanity, even while it reminds us that we are human. How do we live inside this contradiction, that the animals we love best—chiefly, the dog—we also sacrifice to the monument of civiliza
tion, to the monument of ourselves? If we cannot come to any clearer purpose than a stated contradiction, at the very least when we turn again to the animals for help, and that help is given, let us not forget where it came from. It was the animals, it was the space dogs, who taught the cosmonauts to fly.

  ¤

  In 1960 the Soviet government gave Korolev a house in a forested park in north Moscow near the present-day Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics. He lived there until his death in 1966, and these were his most productive years. He is said to have worked sixteen to eighteen hours a day, spending some six months away from home each year. But when he was working in Moscow, he came home every day for lunch. He did not care for foods that required effort to eat, fish with bones, for example, a waste of time to him. He loved pickled herring. He was a reader, and like Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, and von Braun, he loved science fiction, especially Ivan Euremov’s novel Andromeda’s Nebula and the novels of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. He kept the works of Leo Tolstoy among his prized books, and he could recite passages from War and Peace. Like the great novelist himself, Korolev kept a set of dumbbells in his study, believing in physical exercise to sharpen the mind.

  Korolev was the kind of person other people orbited around: his second wife, a few rumored mistresses (for he had a great fondness for women, and they for him), his co-workers, the first cosmonauts, dignitaries and officials of the government. Korolev was very close to Gagarin, who often came to the house to be near him. The house was alive with such people, passing in and out, stopping by for a talk or coffee, a meal or a movie. Korolev kept a reel-to-reel projector in the front sitting room, rare in those days in the Soviet Union (or anywhere, for that matter), and he used any excuse to assemble a party. There in the sitting room he also kept a television. After his first heart attack in December 1960, he avoided the excitement of news and press events. During the great celebrations of Gagarin’s successful flight into orbit in 1961, Korolev stayed at home to watch it on TV.

  Korolev had great taste in art, or so I was told by my guide when I visited his Moscow home. Hung on the walls are several paintings he acquired not long before his death, evidence of a premonition, my guide said. I asked after the titles and the names of the artists. One work, entitled simply Landscape, was touted as the work of a French painter of some renown, but my guide could not name him. Two other paintings, both set at dusk, are entitled Evening Landscape and Evening Landscape by the River. For both, the painters were unknown. The mood of these paintings is dark, to be sure, a setting sun and a foreground of failing light. Fitting scenes for a man fixated on vanishing.

  At the top of the stairs before the entrance to his study is a framed map of the moon, perhaps six feet by six feet in size, a handcrafted original. It was given to Korolev by a scientist in Saint Petersburg to honor his dream of planetary exploration. Korolev believed the moon to be rocky and solid, that a spacecraft could land on it and a cosmonaut could walk on it. Others during this time believed the moon to be gaseous, like the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. The first spacecraft to land on the moon, Luna 2, which Korolev’s team launched in 1959, proved he was right. Further into the study is a globe, a gift from the rocket engineer Valentin Glushko, who is said to have sent Korolev to prison but afterward became his boss (for a time), his colleague, and his friend. On the globe’s stand, Glushko has written: “My dear friend—I wish you to see the Earth like this from space.”

  Korolev’s health problems, which began during his imprisonment, were troubled by his impossible work schedule and unremitting stress. He suffered from a form of kidney disease, cardiac arrhythmia, an inflamed gallbladder, hearing loss (likely from test-firing rocket engines), and intestinal bleeding. On the outside people saw a hale and powerful man who was at the extreme edge of human ingenuity and industry, but his body was failing. In his book Korolev, James Harford cites a letter Korolev wrote to his second wife, Nina Ivanovna, during one of his stays at the launch facility at Baikonur: “I am unusually deeply tired, and sometimes the little heart aches a bit.” Korolev dared not take any rest, however, for he was convinced that without him to drive the newly formed space program, Khrushchev would pull the funding and cancel it. So he worked ever harder, despite knowing he should not. “I can’t work like this any longer,” he once said to his wife.

  To correct a bleeding polyp in his large intestine, on January 5, 1966, Korolev checked into the Kremlin hospital, a facility catering only to top Soviet state and Communist Party officials. The long black wool overcoat and shoes he wore that day are in the closet near the front door of his house. In the hospital, Korolev underwent a series of tests and then into surgery on January 14. In his book, Harford offers the details of Korolev’s death as told by his daughter, Natasha. During the routine surgery, Korolev began to bleed, a persistent bleeding that required his surgeons to cut into his abdomen. There they found a cancerous tumor and went to work to remove it. Korolev was under an anesthetic mask for eight hours, and after the surgery he never regained consciousness. Had the surgeons intubated him, Harford suggests, he might have made it, but his broken jaw from the torture he endured in the gulag had not healed properly and prevented the tube from going in. Still, the tumor was malignant, and according to Harford, “Korolev would not have lived more than a few months, even if he had not been operated on.” His body was cremated and his ashes interred with honors in the Kremlin Wall. He was fifty-nine years old.

  Inside the front door of Korolev’s Moscow home, at the foot of the stairs on a table near the telephone, is a sculpture, To the Stars, a replica of a larger original that is mounted on the grounds of the Theater of the Soviet army in Moscow. The first three cosmonauts in space (Gagarin, Titov, and Nikolayev) presented the sculpture to Korolev as a gift. It features the signatures of all eleven cosmonauts who flew in space during Korolev’s lifetime. The sculpture is of Prometheus, his left arm outstretched, releasing a rocket to the stars. He leans dramatically forward, his body bare but for a cloth draped around his waist that flows and snakes about him. The rocket is to go ever upward, and Prometheus has become part of the rocket, launching into the cosmic void on a voyage of discovery and adventure. Behind the sculpture is a staircase leading up to Korolev’s study. The staircase rises a few steps to a landing, where it turns and rises again past a bright and sunny window looking out into the forested park beyond the house. Korolev would often sit on the second step from the top and look out the window through the leaves of the trees. It was here, my guide told me, that Korolev had his best ideas.

  ¤

  In 1966, a month after Korolev’s death, the Soviets launched a final space dog mission. Both the US and the USSR had turned their sights on landing men on the moon, and this flight would test hardware and life-support systems on an extended stay in space. Ugolyok (Little Piece of Coal or Ember) and Veterok (Little Wind), along with other biological experiments, were sent into orbit on Kosmos 110 for a twenty-five-day mission. The dogs would be pushed into an elliptical orbit with an apogee of 560 miles and pass through the lower Van Allen Belt, where radiation levels were measured between six and twenty-five times higher than on flights in lower orbits. In addition to gathering data on the effects of microgravity on the body during a long flight, the team would also come to better understand the effects of exposure to such high doses of radiation.

  Ugolyok was a fluffy dog, dark as coal as her name indicates, and bearing a rounded mane about her face, ruffed out like a male lion. She was tall and handsome, a dog of appealing conformation, a dog you might want to take home. Veterok, with her short legs and shorter hair, her ears bent over in most photographs, appears as a kind of sidekick, a dog you would keep only if you had another. For that, they were suitable companions. Video footage of the two dogs on a walk (the caregiver, a woman with a beehive hairdo and wearing a white lab coat and black heels) shows them to be energetic, playful, dogs at the peak of their youth. Turkina notes that both dogs had other names before their flight. Ugolyok had been called Snezhok,
which means Snowball, an irony, since she was almost all black. And Verterok had been called Bzdunok, which means Little Fart, perhaps a commentary on her personality or maybe her behavior. Despite the name change, someone, it seems, thought to preserve the humor, as Veterok’s name changed from “little fart” to “little wind.”

  During the flight the dogs would take food and water through stomach tubes. Veterok would be administered doses of a new antiradiation serum through an intravenous needle, while Ugolyok would not. The team could then compare the condition of the two dogs when they returned to Earth. If the serum worked, it might be useful in treating cosmonauts on a mission to the moon or possibly for radiation sickness on Earth, a salve for the threat of nuclear war.

  An article in Time published a couple weeks after the flight suggests that Ugolyok and Veterok were “moon dogs,” the “immediate predecessors of the moon dogs the Russians have said they intend to send into lunar orbit ahead of man.” Such speculation is corroborated by cosmonaut Gherman Titov (the second human in orbit), when he predicted with some disappointment that dogs would land on the moon before humans. Dogs had become so practiced in spaceflight that the newest space race was not between Soviets and Americans, it seemed, but between humans and dogs.

  After twenty days in orbit the team discussed bringing Ugolyok and Veterok back early. The air quality in the capsule was still acceptable, but it was in a state of slow and steady decline. According to Asif Siddiqi in Challenge to Apollo, a landing commission of twenty-five members discussed the issue throughout the night. Yes, they agreed, if the dogs were going to survive, they had to be brought home now. The dogs landed near Saratov, Russia, after twenty-two days in orbit.