by Kurt Caswell
Amy Nelson, who has written a number of articles about Laika and the Soviet space dogs, agrees. Without offering evidence, she told me she thinks Laika could see out her window.
Where, I wanted to know, was proof?
I discovered an article about Sputnik II in Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, published ten days after the satellite launched. In that article, I read, “After the last stage of the rocket was established on its orbit, the protective cone was discarded.” That sounded clear enough, but during these years Pravda was as much propaganda as it was historical record. My research into Laika’s story had all along been a slow sifting of misinformation—some of it intentional and some of it misunderstanding—most of which eventually fell away as I continued to read. Still, I could not accept this single source for truth. I needed more.
Then I discovered the work of Anatoly Zak, an authority on Soviet and Russian space history. On his informative website russianspaceweb.com, Zak includes a design drawing of Sputnik II with the “payload fairing release mechanism” clearly labeled, along with a short animation of the fairing coming off to expose the satellite. His site also offers an artist’s rendering of the satellite in orbit with the Earth visible below. You can see the final-stage booster still attached and the satellite on top of the booster with the fairing removed. The detail is fine enough to identify Laika’s capsule. Zak includes the following caption for that image: “Perched on top of a giant rocket, a tiny window could provide a glimpse of the home planet to the first creature ever sent to orbit the Earth.” I contacted Zak to discuss this detail and hear more about his sources. Where was this information? Could he help me get to the original source he used? Unfortunately, even after repeated invitations, he declined to speak with me.
Frustrated, I wondered if traveling to the source might give me an answer. In June 2016 I toured the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow. On the first floor near the stuffed space dogs Belka and Strelka is a replica of Sputnik II. The outer shell of the satellite is cut away so you can see inside. You can see the cylindrical instrument package on top, the sphere housing the batteries and radio transmitters in the middle, and, nested in the bottom, Laika’s capsule with its window. The fairing is perhaps half an inch thick at best. It appeared to me that the fairing was not designed to come off. Of course it is a replica, and some of its design features may have been left out. It is always best to ask. My guide, a space industry professional who worked on the Soviet Union’s defunct shuttle program, the Buran, gave me a firm and clear answer: “No,” she said in English. “Definitely not. Laika could not see out.”
Back in the United States, Cathleen Lewis at the Smithsonian put me in contact with Art Dula, a Houston attorney specializing in intellectual property and space law. Dula was just then in Moscow and soon to meet with a Russian colleague named Evgeny Albats, who for twenty-eight years worked for Zvezda (reorganized as Joint Stock Company in 1994). At Zvezda, Albats worked closely with colleagues at Energia, the company that designed and built Laika’s capsule. According to Albats, the fairing on Sputnik II was indeed removed in orbit and, he wrote to me, for a time “the dog could see the sky.” Excited by this lead, I inquired further. Is the source for this information published? How do I get access to it? Is the source in English, or will I need help with translation? How could my guide in Moscow get this wrong? But Albats could offer no more help.
There must be a published source, I reasoned, that would answer the question definitively. The challenges to finding it had so far kept me adrift in uncertainties: I had little success getting help from people who work in the Russian space industry. I did not have the security clearance or scholarly authority to access Russian archives. I do not speak or read Russian, which, without a translator, made access to these archives useless. I was just a writer trying to tell the story of a dog. The answer to my question remained beyond my reach.
I thought this was the end of it.
Then I raised the matter with Fordham University historian Asif Siddiqi. A Guggenheim fellow who has written a number of seminal works on Soviet space history and exploration, Siddiqi directed me to volume 1 of Problemy kssmicheskoi biologii (Problems in space biology), edited by N. M. Sisakian. This Russian-language source (Siddiqi is fluent in Russian) offers a detailed account of the Sputnik II mission. It clearly states in a diagram, Siddiqi told me, that the fairing was removed in orbit, exposing Laika’s capsule, and so her window, to space.
At last here was my answer, and it posed another question: with the fairing removed and the window exposed to space, what did Laika see?
Before I could approach this question, a final, curious detail came to light. In my correspondence with James Schombert, an observational astronomer at the University of Oregon and formerly with NASA, he mentioned, almost passively, that if Laika could see out her window, she may well have had a dizzying view, because Sputnik II was spinning. In all my research, how could I have missed this essential detail? Then I recalled a terse phrase in Chernov and Yakovlev’s paper that I had passed over: “In the flight of the satellite, in spite of its slow revolution, weightlessness was always practically complete.” I read those words again: “in spite of its slow revolution.” It really was spinning. I asked Schombert for more information. “The combined system [of Sputnik II] had no attitude control (jets or gyros),” he said. “The whole rocket was given spin on lift-off. This is standard procedure and is achieved by small side rockets on the first stage. It appears from the science reports that some of this rotation was still in place when [the satellite reached orbit].”
I asked Gil Moore what he knew about the spin stabilization of Sputnik II. “I do know that the second, third, and fourth stages of the Jupiter C launch vehicle that orbited Explorer I, as well as the third stage of the Vanguard launch vehicle that orbited Vanguard I, were spun up,” he said. “Since I saw for myself the repetitive sunlight flashes in the twilight sky from the final-stage motor of Sputnik I’s launch vehicle as it tumbled end over end, I would assume that Sputnik II was also spinning.”
While Robert Goddard had developed gyroscopic stabilization for rockets decades before Sputnik II, it was not yet standard hardware. In 1957 the easiest and most inexpensive way to stabilize a rocket in flight was to spin it, because when you spin an object it becomes a kind of gyro itself and highly resistant to changes in attitude. You want the rocket to fly like an arrow shot from a bow, and spinning it around its minor axis, which runs nose to tail, can achieve this. As the rocket gains altitude and enters orbit, it loses energy as its main engines burn out and drop away. Energy dissipation, and imperfections in the load balance of the rocket, causes this spin around the minor axis to become unstable, and the rocket will begin to spin around its major axis, which runs laterally across the center of the rocket body. As the rocket slows down, it begins to tumble end over end. Positioned in the nose cone of the rocket, Laika would have been spinning as if seated in the center of a merry-go-round during the rocket’s flight, and when it entered orbit and started to tumble she would have tumbled with it, like riding a Ferris wheel, around and around. The rate of this spin would have been relatively slow, Schombert told me, not above about one rotation per minute, otherwise “centripetal force would have locked Laika to the wall.”
It is necessary to take an imaginative leap here, for while we now know that Laika could see out and that the satellite was tumbling in its orbit, we cannot know what she saw, if anything. She was dehydrated and near death from her long delay on the ground, but even in her weakened state, as I see it, the answer to this question is that she saw everything. In the tumbling roll of the satellite, the little window turning over and over on the world, Laika was looking at everything there is, everything there ever was, her eyes taking in starlight that traveled across oceans of time to reach her, light from distant galaxies, from across a billion years, and she was looking down on the living Earth from orbit, even if in a chaotic whirl of the satellite
’s motion, and she was the first to take in this view. She saw the Earth, the blue marble, fragile, vulnerable, a kind of spaceship itself floating in the black void, impossibly alone. While Ivanovsky claims that Laika was “unaware of what was happening to her and where she actually was,” I think she knew. If a dog is anything, it is sensitive and intuitive, and while Laika would not have had our understanding of orbit and space, I think she understood that something big had happened to her. I think she understood—in what way a dog can—that she had crossed the threshold of our world and was now far away. I think she sensed that she had flown into a forbidden realm, far beyond any place anyone had ever been before, a place so foreign, so formidable, so beyond the ken of the ordinary that it would now be nearly impossible for her to come home.
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As Sputnik II struck a path over the continents, the Soviet Union announced to the world the successful launch and orbit of a living being. As with any news from afar during this time, the initial hours offered inconsistent reports, which were updated as more information came in. Once the West came to understand that the satellite carried a dog, the technological achievements the Soviets were lauding were brushed aside. Never mind that the rocket had lifted over 1,100 pounds into space and so could therefore send a nuclear warhead to America or anywhere else. Never mind that sending an animal into space meant the Soviets would soon be able to send a man into space. Never mind that, as Korolev had claimed, the way to the stars really was open. What was the dog’s name, people all over the world wanted to know, and how would it get back home?
Western media considered that the Soviet space dog program had launched dogs into space before and returned them using parachutes. Some had been featured alive and well at press conferences. Some had even given birth to litters of puppies. Perhaps the Soviets would bring the dog home under a parachute or using some other method yet unknown. Perhaps the dog was going to be all right. Other media reports doubted it could come back at all. The spacecraft was in orbit, so how could they get it down? The world stood anxiously by, hoping, even praying, for the dog’s safe return.
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As Laika made her first and then second orbit, her capsule began to heat up. The data coming into the Soviet ground stations indicated that she was agitated, anxious, moving about, possibly barking. The forced-air cooling system inside the capsule was not keeping pace with the sources of heat: the spent rocket body still attached to the satellite, the electrical systems, the sun, and heat from Laika herself. But there was nothing anyone on the ground could do about it. Some sources indicate that thermal insulation protecting Laika’s capsule was damaged, which could have happened when the fairing separated from the satellite. Such damage isn’t unheard of, as in the case of the damaged heat tiles on space shuttle Columbia in 2003, which led to its destruction on reentry. Both Gazenko and Kotovskaya point to the sun as a major factor in heating Sputnik II. Due to its elliptical orbit, the satellite “spent longer in the sun than had been planned,” Gazenko said in an interview in Space Dogs, “and it began gradually to heat up.” In her article, Kotovskaya writes that the “temperature control system inside the capsule was designed so that, while orbiting the Earth, the satellite [would] make it in the shade at times” and cool down. “Unfortunately, the satellite orbit came to be much elongated, elliptical, and most of the time it was in the sunlight.”
According to NASA, the temperature range outside the ISS can be as cold as -250 degrees Fahrenheit (on the shady side of Earth), and as hot as 250 degrees Fahrenheit (on the sunny side). The cooling and heating system onboard the space station must be able to manage these extremes. When astronauts work outside the station, performing an “extravehicular activity,” also known as a spacewalk, their space suits too must be able to manage this temperature range. Even so, they sense these extreme temperatures through the suit. Temperature control for biological habitats in orbit is an ongoing challenge even in the twenty-first century, so it is not surprising that the Soviets didn’t get this quite right on their first try.
Dogs do not manage heat well. Normal body temperature range for dogs is 101 to 102.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything above that will cause an increase in heart rate and respiration (excessive panting), restlessness complicated by lethargy, and possibly vomiting and diarrhea. A body temperature of 106 degrees is often the line between life and death. If a dog’s body temperature rises to that level, it will likely die, and die soon if it cannot cool down. Dogs sweat only from a gland in the bottom of their feet, which is why some dogs will stand in cool water, or in their water dish, after vigorous exercise in warm weather. They also pant, gassing off heat and circulating cooling air through their mouth and nose and over their tongue. But even better than sweating from their feet and panting is to find protection and relief from the heat in cool water, in shade, or indoors.
John Smith, a veterinarian in Texas who allowed me to observe him performing both a spay and a neuter surgery, told me that heat exhaustion can become critical in dogs very quickly. If you are going to save a dog in heat distress, Smith said, you have to bring their temperature down rapidly, usually by immersing the dog in an ice bath. The dog is then very weak, vulnerable, and highly sensitive to temperature. Once cooled, the dog must be removed from the ice bath and stabilized, or else its temperature will continue to fall and the dog will die going in the other direction. If the dog can’t cool down, either on its own or with help, it will become increasingly lethargic and disoriented, fall into a coma-like state, and die. It doesn’t take long, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, Smith told me, depending on how hot it is and how fit the dog is, and so how efficient it is at cooling itself. Humidity increases the heat challenge and the process can move along more rapidly. I asked Smith what dying from heat feels like for a dog. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Pain.”
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After three times around the Earth, the temperature in Laika’s capsule had climbed to 104 degrees Fahrenheit and possibly as high as 109 degrees. Shortly after that, the data from Laika’s sensors stopped coming in. There was no sign of respiration or pulse, no sign of anything except the satellite itself, streaking across the sky, crossing continents in minutes, speeding faster than anything humans had ever built. The Soviets celebrated the Revolution and the state that manufactured it, a miracle really, the satellite, the flight of the first living being in space, the new religion of science and technology that had so elevated the Soviet Union, at least in those days and months, to the status of the greatest nation on Earth.
I have imagined Laika in her capsule speeding around the planet in the mostly dark, the unseen immensity of the cosmos surrounding her. She would have started panting as the temperature rose, a little at first, then heavily as her temperature rose with the temperature of the capsule, her heart rate rising too, her eyes closing with the cooling action of her panting as she struggled to manage the heat. The more she panted, the more she raised the humidity inside the capsule and in turn the temperature, overwhelming the cooling and air regeneration system—a greenhouse effect. She could not move much, seated there in that pod, wires pulled out from beneath her skin, whirling through space. Seated there, her eyes began to close in her growing lethargy, and an agitation too rising in her with the temperature, because as a young dog she still possessed a great deal of energy, and yet she could do nothing about that, nothing to quiet the heat, to end the threat she felt coming on. Her thirst would have been immense. She could not move away from the heat or seek shelter from it, the shade of a tree perhaps or the sanctuary of her home. Perhaps she wanted for some of that space dog food, that gelatinous glob set before her at the feeding tin because it had given her a little relief. But I imagine that her appetite left her as the temperature climbed, and if she had had more food in those last moments, she would not have touched it. All she could do was sit there, her eyes falling heavy and closing, not from the action of her panting now but because she was drifting in and out of a melancholic delirium that settled in, her
eyes filling with the flashes of light that come in the darkness in space, and her head no longer in her control, floating on its stem, her paws stretched out before her to the front of the capsule just a few inches from the shores of the universe. Then Laika fell into a coma from which she would never awake. And that was all.
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When the team came to understand that Laika was dead only a few hours into her flight, they continued to report on the success of the launch and the satellite. The Soviets had already been criticized for their space dog program, so they remained silent about Laika’s demise. When I asked Sergei Khrushchev why the team had kept Laika’s death secret, he replied, “It was not kept secret. Because we were not publicizing it does not mean it was kept secret. There was not a way to bring the dog back, so it was understood that the dog would be sacrificed for science. No one knew, really, that the capsule had overheated at the time. It was of no interest to anybody to announce that the dog died, but rather to celebrate the launch.” There was no conspiracy here, Khrushchev was telling me, so much as a continued focus on the achievements of Sputnik II. And those achievements were real. Laika was always going to die, so did it matter that she died sooner or later, before or after? The satellite was in orbit, and no nation on Earth had achieved such a towering technological feat except the Soviet Union, and they had now done it twice.
Still, the Soviets were practiced at neglecting to report or even record embarrassing failures. It was policy to demonstrate Soviet power and achievement to the world, as it was policy to do the same in the United States. What benefit was there in offering the long trail of trials and mistakes? “It’s mostly lost now in the enormity of those achievements,” Dubbs told me, “but [Laika’s death] was a failure of technology, or rather of Soviet philosophy. Laika was sacrificed as much for political expedience as for advancing the space program, and the Soviets did not want to advertise their failures.”