Laika's Window

by Kurt Caswell

  The space dogs that had gone beyond the Karman line before Laika had lingered in microgravity for only a few minutes. With Laika in orbit indefinitely, the ground team could investigate the effect of microgravity on a living being over time. The team needed at least twenty minutes of data from Laika’s sensors to make an initial assessment. The ground stations could only receive data for fifteen minutes before Sputnik II flew out of range. It would have to do. Using that data, the team determined that Laika’s vitals had returned to normal, oxygen levels in the capsule were adequate to support life, and the capsule did not lose pressure after entering the vacuum of space. Laika’s flight had just proven that microgravity was tolerable for a human being in orbit. What the limits were no one yet knew, but Korolev and his team were now confident that they could build a rocket and a capsule that could take a man safely into orbit. One day Earth orbit would teem with satellites and cosmonauts working on orbital space stations, but for now it was Laika alone who was sailing in the resolution of the stars.

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  When I spoke with American astronaut Donald Pettit, I asked him about the experience of rocket flight. What did it feel like to fly? An astronaut experiences a great deal of noise and vibration, he said, but from inside a space suit that noise and vibration is minimized. In a Soyuz-type rocket (the kind of rocket Laika flew in), the force against the body is about 3–4g, Pettit told me. The result, he said, is that “you’re pushed pretty hard into your seat.” But you are pushed pretty hard into your seat on an increasing scale as the rocket accelerates and then only for about eight minutes, or until the rocket enters microgravity. That 600 pounds is reduced suddenly and dramatically, but it is not reduced to zero. The term “zero gravity” is misleading because there is plenty of gravity in orbit. If there were no gravity in orbit, there would be no orbit at all. In zero gravity, a satellite or the ISS would simply fly off into the great unknown, the moon would not be the Earth’s constant companion, and the solar system, even the galaxy itself, would not hold together. Gravity on a spacecraft in orbit is about 88.8 percent of what it is on Earth. The reason astronauts and objects float in Earth orbit is not because there is no gravity. They float because the spacecraft and everything in it is falling around the Earth at the same velocity. To be in orbit is to be in a continuous state of free fall, the spacecraft and everything in it, falling back to Earth. But in orbit a spacecraft’s velocity is in equilibrium with gravity so that it will never reach the surface. The spacecraft falls around the Earth, and it just keeps falling.

  Human astronauts ride into space positioned on their back because it’s easier to breathe. They can inflate their lungs upward into the empty space above them. Lying on their bellies doesn’t work, because under the force of 3 or 4g, astronauts would have to inflate their lungs by pushing the now tremendous weight of their body upward, again and again, for eight minutes. It would be like trying to breathe while lying on your belly with two or three people sitting on top of you. An astronaut’s blood can flow almost normally while positioned on his or her back, as the force of acceleration is acting laterally on the body. If the body is vertical to the force of acceleration (toe to head, or head to toe), blood either rushes away from the brain, which can cause a loss of consciousness, or it rushes to the brain, which can cause cerebral hemorrhaging and possibly death.

  In The First Steps, Ivanovsky describes film footage of rats riding into space on a rocket. “While taking off and accelerating, rats slow down, their legs are wide apart, their heads go lower and lower, and finally hit the floor,” he writes. “The g-force presses an animal down to the floor, and it stops moving, its muscles cannot cope with the increased weight.” He goes on to say that a “few seconds later the animal suddenly takes off from the floor and for a moment hangs somewhere in the middle of the box. No support! The rat begins to move randomly in the box. It goes from turning around its axis to flying into the corner, from spinning, like a spindle, to somersaulting.” As weight is a primary indicator of up and down for all terrestrial animals on Earth, the rats lose “the sense of up and down, and [have] no points of support and no signals from legs and tail are being delivered. Only the vision continues on normally, but at first [they fail] to deal with the chaos of other perceptions.”

  Laika wore a flight suit to keep her sensors in place, but she did not wear a space suit. Her sealed capsule inside Sputnik II, however, helped minimized the noise and vibration from the rocket. These sensations were familiar to her too, as she had trained to tolerate them. To avoid injury during the rocket’s ascent, Laika was secured with restraining chains while lying on her belly. Lying on her back would have been the best way to endure the g-force of acceleration, but as Pettit observed, dogs “are not meant to lie on their back. Dogs lie down [on their belly], and a dog isn’t used to having a lot of force on their belly either. The geometry of a dog is not something that could take a lot of force. I think it would probably be more unpleasant for a dog [to ride a rocket into space] than it would be for a human being.”

  The acceleration of the rocket, then, put a lot of force on Laika’s belly, making it hard for her to breathe. This is why her respiration increased so dramatically. She was probably taking rapid, shallow breaths, trying to keep air in her lungs as the rocket pressed up beneath her. Once she entered microgravity, the noise and vibration and the tremendous force of acceleration vanished. She would have felt much more at ease, but for her unbearable thirst.

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  Imagining Laika up there in her spacecraft, confined in that small capsule, makes me feel lonely. This loneliness is my loneliness, of course, but I am not the only one to feel it. Many of the people I spoke with in working on this book were quick to inquire about Laika’s loneliness and to express their own loneliness when faced with the thought of her up there alone in space, with the thought of her dying in space. Why do we feel this way when we imagine Laika spinning across the roof of the world, forever interred in that metal can?

  Lots of people surrender to animal emotions, dog emotions especially. Can we know how a dog feels when we think of them as feeling like us? In fact, we depend on them to accede to the way we feel, even as we cast our feelings upon them. Knowing this, it is still worth asking: Did Laika get lonely in her spacecraft? Was Laika lonely as she died? Can we say, even, that dogs feel loneliness? Or did Laika feel a sense of purpose in the way that a working dog can? Or perhaps she felt nothing at all. We know that dogs can feel, that they have feelings. Anyone who has ever lived with a dog knows this. We know too that our dogs respond to our feelings. They sense our anger at them, and our anger at each other. Dogs know when people are fighting, when they are in conflict and distress. Dogs pick up these feelings and are then equally in distress. Dogs know when people are happy and at their ease. Dogs then are happy and at ease. A dog knows when another dog is in pain, or when we are in pain, when we are suffering from a wound in the body or a wound in the heart. Our dogs are drawn to our wounds, drawn to us in the center of our grief, drawn to our tears. It follows, then, that dogs might feel lonely.

  In a study published by the Association for Psychological Science, social psychologist John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago and his team assert that “loneliness is not a uniquely human phenomenon.” Animals of various kinds, especially social mammals, do in fact experience loneliness. Their loneliness, and ours, can be measured by physical responses in the body, namely by “a significant increase in plasma cortisol,” a stress hormone. And why do animals feel lonely? Because loneliness is an adaptation, writes Cacioppo; it “represents a generally adaptive predisposition in response to a discrepancy between an animal’s preferred and actual social relations that can be found across phylogeny.” Loneliness, he writes, “has evolved as a signal to change behavior—very much like hunger, thirst, or physical pain.” In manageable doses, then, loneliness triggers a response in the individual to establish or repair social relationships. Social animals need each other, and so loneliness can help keep a group
or pair tightly bound, which betters each individual’s chances of survival. As an adaptive predisposition, loneliness has been here a long time; it was here on Earth before humans.

  When I spoke with astronaut Donald Pettit about his experiences in space, I asked him about loneliness. Pettit is a good man to ask such a question, because he has spent a lot of time in space: 370 days, with thirteen hours of accumulated spacewalk time. In 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia broke up as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board, Pettit was living and working on the ISS. His mission there was extended to six months, and he had to return to Earth in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft because space shuttle flights had been suspended for the next two and half years. With the space shuttle grounded, I asked him: Did he feel lonely up there in space? Was he not struck by the fear that he might never get home? He is a scientist, a chemical engineer, and I imagine his mind is logically and pragmatically arranged, but even so, everyone gets lonely sometimes.

  “There is no sense of loneliness in space at all,” Pettit told me. “This is a myth I often get asked about and there’s absolutely no loneliness. There’s no isolation.” He went on to say that on the ISS, you’re only 240 miles away from Earth, which is just a bit more than the distance from Dallas to Houston. You can get home in a few hours. “It isn’t like you’re going to Alpha Centauri or something,” the closest star system to ours at 4.3 light-years away, Pettit said. “You are really close to Earth. If you go to some place like Antarctica [where Pettit has traveled], you are more isolated and more remote than if you are in space.”

  I asked Pettit about Mars. Did he think loneliness would be a factor on a future mission to Mars? “It may become more of an issue the farther you go from home,” Pettit said. “I think part of it is the selection of crew members.” If you have to be in touch with family two or three times a day, he told me, “a trip to Mars may not be the kind of thing you want to do. But the kind of people that seem to gravitate toward space exploration are the same kind of people that can get on a sailing ship in the seventeenth century and disappear for three or four years.”

  American astronaut Jerry Linenger had a different experience in space. In Off the Planet, his account of his five-month mission on the Russian space station Mir in 1997, Linenger “was astounded at how much [he] had underestimated the strain of living cut off from the world in an unworldly environment. The isolation was extreme in every way.” Part of Linenger’s feelings stemmed from carrying the burden of responsibility on the station: taking care of other people’s science projects, coping with malfunctioning life-support systems, looking at “the same two faces [his Russian crewmates] for months on end.” Linenger was able to “generate the intellectual and emotional stamina required to get the job done because [he] knew that there would be an end to it all.” But unlike Pettit, Linenger felt cut off, isolated, deeply lonely.

  Most of us get lonely. Loneliness is fundamental to the human condition. To be human is to be lonely. We are, writes Ben Lazare Mijuskovic in Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature, “intrinsically alone and irredeemably lost.” Everything we do, even our consciousness, is driven by an underlying motivation to avoid loneliness, to avoid isolation. “Forlornness constitutes the very essence of man’s existence.” And what is so painful about loneliness is that we feel something missing deep in the self, but we do not necessarily know what it is or how to fix it. We do not know what it is that we do not have. Loneliness is the “absence of an awareness of any thing or sensation; it is a meaningless nothingness,” Mijuskovic writes. And unfortunately, loneliness is a mainspring of modern civilization. Our ancestors lived in small, intimate, highly communal groups. Civilization, especially Western civilization, has broken and fractured such communities and fed us the lie that strength resides in the individual, alone.

  We know that loneliness can be a major health challenge for human beings, that it crushes people and keeps them crushed, and that the lonelier they are, the lonelier they get. Cacioppo has determined that loneliness can contribute to problems like high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, heart attack, stroke, and even death. You can die from loneliness. Loneliness can cause inflammation in the body; problems with learning and memory; cognitive decline and dementia; a reduction in the efficiency and virus-fighting ability of the body’s immune system. Lonely people don’t sleep well either, so sleep is not as restorative as it might be. Loss of sleep or interrupted sleep can in turn contribute to more loneliness. And loneliness itself contributes to more loneliness, putting a lonely person in a downward spiral that becomes tougher and tougher to climb out of. The most terrible poverty is loneliness, Mother Teresa taught us. We cannot be prosperous human beings, it turns out, if we are chronically lonely.

  Loneliness cannot be avoided, but it can be transcended. To transcend it we must connect with other beings. “As a meaning, the essence of loneliness consists in the overwhelming desire of the yet-unrelated ego to locate, unify, connect, or bind itself in relation to other egos (even animal egos, pets) or objects (e.g., hobbies, amusements),” writes Mijuskovic. The path to transcending loneliness—for human beings and for dogs—is social interaction and acceptance, establishing and maintaining a rich web of relationships, a community, or as Macbeth puts it in Shakespeare’s play, “troops of friends.”

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  I was first drawn to Laika’s story by imagining what she saw out her window from space, that her view might have offered her relief from the anxiety of confinement, from boredom, and, yes, from loneliness. I imagined the inside of her capsule illuminated by moonshine, and in that brightness, her gaze drawn out onto the bright orb of the moon, and farther still into the blackness of the cosmic deep. She would have seen her reflection too, or a ghost of it, as the dark interior of the capsule was matched by the mostly black of space. I imagined her looking down (or what appears to us as down) onto our cities illuminated on the planet’s surface as she passed through the nighttime and then around into day and over the tracks of the Earth’s great rivers, long blue spindles running out to the seas, the green of tropical forests, the white matte of winter clouds in the northern hemisphere, circulating storms over the southern oceans, the ocean itself, its impossible blue. I imagined that she saw all that, and as she did, I wondered what she wondered, what she thought about what she saw, and what she felt. I hoped that the view out her window calmed her and gave her a sense of peace into which she died.

  In working on this book, I read a great number of books and articles, and I talked with a great number of people who knew Laika’s story better than I did. The questions I posed again and again were: Could Laika, in fact, see out her window when she was in space? Was what I had imagined true? Was it Laika, not Gagarin, who was the first living being to see Earth from orbit? Some sources affirmed that Laika could see out her window into space. Others were either not so sure or mostly uninterested in this detail. What did it matter anyway? A few people I spoke with confessed that no one had ever asked them this question, and they simply didn’t know. Still other sources led me to a resounding no, Laika would not have been able to see out the window. But I did not want to vacillate in this emptiness of no and yes, and I don’t know; I wanted a definitive answer. I wanted proof.

  The issue is the fairing on the nose cone of the rocket. When you look at a rocket—United Launch Alliance’s dependable Atlas V, for example—you see a long, smooth booster body rising up from the ground, and then about three-quarters of the way to the top, an elongated bulb on the nose of it. This elongated bulb is the payload, the spacecraft or probe or satellite to be deployed in space. Covering it is a protective shell called a fairing. When the rocket enters orbit, the final-stage booster is usually jettisoned along with the fairing, which releases the spacecraft inside. Free from the rocket and its protective shell, the spacecraft can meet its mission goals, whatever those are. The question about Laika’s view from her window centers on whether the Soviet team removed the fairi
ng from the satellite when it reached orbit.

  Some of the people I spoke with told me that if the goal was to simply get the satellite into orbit it made little sense for the team to take the time (time they didn’t have) to install the hardware necessary to remove the fairing. Even if the team had the time, the required hardware and pyrotechnics would have added extra weight to the vehicle. One reason the final-stage booster was not jettisoned from Sputnik II was to reduce the rocket’s overall weight. Removing the fairing would have added more weight as well as cost and time.

  But there is another way of looking at this. “If I were flying that mission, I would have jettisoned the nosecone [fairing],” Gil Moore told me. “Leaving the nosecone on, which covered the satellite, would have interfered with their ability to measure the cosmic ray environment Laika was exposed to in orbit. They would have had better results if the nosecone was removed. And I can’t imagine the extra weight of the hardware to remove the nosecone would have made a difference to that R-7 rocket. It had twenty-five engines. Twenty-five!” He continued: “They had to get the nosecone out of the way when they deployed Sputnik I, so the hardware to do that had already been developed. And I would think that with Sputnik II, they would have wanted to get that nosecone out of the way. But I don’t know definitively. I wasn’t there, and the Soviets worked in secret. Besides,” Moore said, “exposing the window for Laika would have been good preparation for Gagarin, who did have a view of the Earth from orbit.”