by Kurt Caswell
The day after the launch, the media reported that the dog—who was still without a name in most countries outside the Soviet Union—was doing fine and might yet be recovered. The next day, November 5, the satellite dominated the news again, with articles speculating about the dog’s return, articles expressing outrage at sending a dog at all, and articles supporting the choice as a necessary step in human spaceflight. Turkina writes in Soviet Space Dogs that Radio Moscow issued this statement to the greater Soviet Union: “Although we are filled with sympathy and sorrow for little Laika, at the same time we cannot divert our attention from the enormous significance of her sacrifice for scientific research.” The announcement does not indicate knowledge of Laika’s death but of her eventual death. It is a call for sympathy and sorrow in preparing the public for that inevitability, at least in the Soviet Union.
Protests broke out in the West. In London members of the National Canine Defense League met with the first secretary of the Soviet Embassy to protest and called for a worldwide daily minute of silence until Laika was returned home. In New York City a picket line formed in front of the United Nations offices. In a telegram to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, an animal adoption group characterized Sputnik II as an atrocity. In Sputnik: The Shock of the Century, Dickson reports that the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals deplored using a dog to test a technology that could not “possibly advance human health and welfare.” A New York Times editorial characterized the dog in space as the “shaggiest, lonesomest, saddest dog in all history.” On November 6 an Australian newspaper reported that the dog in the satellite was called Laika.
Soviet scientists were still reporting telemetry signals coming in from Sputnik II as late as November 7, which was in fact true. Laika was dead, but onboard instruments were sending back information about radiation levels and cosmic rays in orbit. On November 10 Sputnik II’s batteries went flat and all telemetry transmissions ceased. Radio Moscow affirmed this on November 11, and then on November 12 the Soviets announced to the world that Laika was dead.
For the next several decades various Soviet publications offered conflicting accounts of Laika’s death. The Soviets acknowledged that Laika could not have been brought back, and so they had euthanized her quickly, painlessly, humanely. Some sources say that Laika had been fed a poison in her food. Others say a poisonous gas was released into her capsule. Some report she was injected automatically with a poisonous serum. Still other reports had Laika dying of asphyxiation when the oxygen supply in her capsule ran out. These stories faded with time as the world turned to other affairs. Then in 1993, at work on Animals in Space, co-author Colin Burgess met with Oleg Gazenko in Vienna at the Association of Space Explorers congress. In that conversation, Gazenko confirmed that Laika had died “soon after launch” of heat exhaustion.
If the Soviets had developed the technology to return Laika to Earth and made the decision to bring her back when her capsule started heating up, it would have done little good. She would have died anyway. There was not enough time to get her to the ground and release her from the capsule to cool her down. The team had discussed how to deal with a problem like this, how to euthanize Laika by some mechanism they controlled from the ground so that she didn’t suffer. “We had wanted an option to kill Laika,” Seryapin said in Space Dogs. “Laika would be put out of her misery within a few seconds. Some say it was planned that way, but I don’t know. It didn’t happen, and Laika died a slow and painful death that lasted about an hour and a half to two hours.”
I think Laika’s death lasted much longer than two hours. I think she started dying the moment they put her in the capsule. After the first day inside the capsule, while still on the ground, she began to suffer from dehydration despite the team’s efforts, despite their love and care for her. By the time she entered orbit she had been inside the capsule for three days with only the water in her space dog food and the little water she received from Yazdovsky and Alexander Dmitrievich through the breathing hole. By the time the temperature began to rise inside her capsule in orbit, her suffering must have been at an end, for she would have mostly been gone already. For Laika to survive in space for seven days was an impossibility. She had no chance.
The story of Laika’s death, when and how she died, did not come to light until 2002. Dimitri Malashenkov, who had worked on the Sputnik II project, gave a paper entitled “Some Unknown Pages of the Living Organism’s First Orbital Flight” at the World Space Conference in Houston, Texas. With this paper, Malashenkov explained to the world for the first time that Laika had died not after seven days in orbit but after several hours. “After ground simulation of the flight conditions the conclusion has been made,” he writes, “that Layka should be lost from an overheating on 3–4 circuit of flight,” meaning between the third and fourth orbit. Written in what appears to be Malashenkov’s English, not in translation, he goes on to remark that “it was practically impossible to create a reliable system of a temperature control in such small term.”
¤
When you travel to a place that is not your own, it is best to have a guide. You need help from a guide who knows where you are going, who has been there before, who can point out its dangers and pleasures and subtleties. On our journey into space, Laika was that guide for us. She was our scout, a star dog, a cyborg, a highly trained cosmonaut, the first cosmonaut, the first space traveler, an explorer in her own right. We followed her into Earth orbit and from there found our courage and journeyed to the moon. After the hollow years of World War II and on into the Cold War night terrors of global nuclear devastation, we all needed something to believe in, something to sustain our broken spirits. A trained soldier of the Cold War, a war dog, Laika emerged from that hostility to forge a new season of cooperation in space between the USSR, the US, and other nations, whose governments had so polarized the world, so cultivated a climate of fear, that we were living in the shadow of our mutual destruction. Had those rockets all been missiles, we would have no science in space, no space exploration; we would have only war. But a dog—even a war dog—doesn’t believe in war. A dog believes only in the task at hand. In space, Laika flew over all our troubles, all our pettiness, and opened a window on our world and on the cosmos, and through that window we could all see that the grand design was so much grander, more mysterious, more vast and empty and dark and filled with light than we had imagined. We came to understand that only in combining our resources—our science and technology, our political wills, our economies, our cultures and our art—could we explore that mystery. Laika was not a lab animal, not the subject of experimentation, not a victim of human ambition. She was an extension of the men and women who trained her, an extension of the Soviet Union, and an extension of us all. She was an extension of our desire for cosmic exploration, our desire to know, our desire to cast our voices into the dark and listen for what might be returned. She was the sacrificial being to an idea we had of ourselves—our better natures—the animal representation of what we all wish to be. And it is because of Laika that we can have this wish. She represents for us the threshold between the past and the future, between terrestrial life on Earth and a life unbounded among the stars. She is the line between gravity and microgravity, between confinement and freedom, between the known and the unknown, between Earth-faring and space-faring, between the terrestrial and the celestial. Laika crossed all these thresholds for us so that we could learn how to do it ourselves. She was, herself, a satellite, just as we are a satellite of her, following her off and away into the unknown dark.
¤
Epilogue
The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.
KONSTANTIN TSIOLKOVSKY
personal letter, 1911
If we can get to Mars, we can go anywhere.
STEPHEN PETRANEK
How We’ll Live on Mars, 2015
In his lecture “Mankind in the Universe,” given before the German and Austrian Physical
Societies in Salzburg in 1969, American theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson marked the beginning of the Space Age as June 5, 1927, when “nine men meeting in a restaurant in Breslau [now Wroclaw, Poland] founded Verein für Raumschiffahrt” (VFR), the Association for Space Navigation. The VFR was a private upstart without government funding that for six years “carried through the basic engineering development of liquid-fueled rockets.” Hitler shut it down, but as Dyson sees it, the VFR stands as the “first romantic age in the history of spaceflight.”
Then in 1958, another grassroots organization, this time in the United States, formed around a theoretical physicist named Ted Taylor, who wanted to build a spacecraft powered by nuclear explosions. Dyson, one of the key members of the team, stated in his 1969 lecture that the organization had the spirit of the VFR in mind, and they began with three principles:
1. The conventional von Braun approach to space travel using chemical rockets would soon run into a dead end, since manned flights going farther than the moon would become absurdly expensive.
2. The key to interplanetary flight must be to use nuclear fuel, which carries in each kilogram a million times as much energy as chemical fuel.
3. A small group of people with daring and imagination could design a nuclear spaceship that would be both cheaper and enormously more capable than the best chemical rocket.
The group called itself Project Orion. “We felt from the beginning,” Dyson said, “that space travel must become cheap before it can have a liberating influence on human affairs.” In Project Orion, Dyson saw a better use of the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons: “We have for the first time imagined a way to use the huge stockpiles of our bombs for better purpose than for murdering people. My purpose, and my belief, is that the bombs which killed and maimed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki shall one day open the skies to man.”
Ted Taylor, whose story is the subject of John McPhee’s 1973 book The Curve of Binding Energy, called the H-bomb the worst invention ever but also the most interesting. He was attracted to extremes in physics, and nuclear explosions are about as extreme as it gets. Space exploration and science go side by side with the bomb and its delivery system, the missile, with one key difference: while highly competitive, space exploration and science also encourage cooperation among nations, as opposed to conflict, to achieve goals. Turner saw an opportunity to transform humankind’s most destructive power into one of its most constructive. Dyson agreed wholeheartedly, suggesting that Project Orion was “not only a scientific instrument but an imperative for the future of the world,” writes McPhee. While one danger of possessing the awesome power of nuclear weapons was using them against each other, Dyson also identified another danger fundamental to the human species. “He saw the human race running out of frontiers,” McPhee writes, “and he considered frontiers essential to the human psyche, for without them pressures would build that would implode upon the race and destroy it.” Space—that final frontier—Dyson was saying, might save us from ourselves.
Taylor’s vision was a spaceship containing two thousand nuclear bombs that dispensed through a hole one at a time and exploded beneath the ship, propelling it upward. Building the bombs was the easy part. In order to learn how to deploy them, Project Orion consulted with Coca-Cola to understand their coin-operated Coke dispensing machines. The bottom of the spacecraft had to be constructed of something that could take multiple nuclear blasts. Taylor considered steel, copper, aluminum, and wood. The team resolved that some kind of fiberglass might work best. The bombs would be of increasingly higher yield, pushing the ship upward out of the Earth’s atmosphere, until the fiftieth bomb, which, “at twenty kilotons,” writes McPhee, “would be of the force that destroyed Nagasaki.” Such immense power (unachievable using liquid-or solid-fueled rockets) could lift a payload of a thousand tons into orbit and then beyond. The team imagined a spaceship shaped like a bullet about the size of a ten-story building with all the amenities of a cruise ship inside: state rooms, exercise and recreation rooms, a restaurant with an observation deck, a level devoted to gardens and food animals. The ship would launch from Jackass Flats, Nevada, or possibly from a barge at sea, and it would be, Taylor told McPhee, “the most sensational thing anyone ever saw.” With Orion, the team determined, human beings would land on Mars by 1965 and travel to Saturn by 1970.
In 1961 Taylor traveled to Huntsville, Alabama, and presented his idea to Werner von Braun, who became its powerful proponent. A believer in the necessity of a voyage to Mars, von Braun had written a book on the subject more than ten years earlier, Das Marsprojekt, which was later translated into English as The Mars Project. It is, writes Stephen Petranek in How We’ll Live on Mars, “a work of extraordinary foresight and sheer engineering genius.”
The US Air Force backed Project Orion but had to justify it as a military endeavor. A spacecraft powered by nuclear explosions could also resist nuclear explosions fired at it, and so could safely rain down bombs on the enemy without fear of counterattack. McPhee writes that the Strategic Air Command’s general Thomas Power said, “Whoever builds Orion will control the Earth!” Faced with this irony—a project founded on using nuclear bombs to elevate and advance human life instead of killing people, backed by a military that wanted to use that same technology to kill people—Taylor was convinced that they were close to getting it done. McPhee quotes Taylor: “Just a few little twists of events and everything we were trying to do with Orion would have come through.” Once up and running, both Taylor and Dyson were convinced, Orion would throw open the door to the mysteries of the universe, and that new knowledge would safeguard life on Earth.
But Project Orion was anathema to many scientists and engineers, then and now, especially when it comes to safeguarding life on Earth. Detonating nuclear bombs in the Earth’s atmosphere produces radioactive fallout, radiation that rains back down onto Earth. By the early 1960s scientists were measuring strontium-90 in cow’s milk, a radioactive isotope prevalent in fallout from the routine testing of nuclear bombs, primarily by the US and the USSR. When ingested, strontium-90 finds its way into bones and can cause bone cancer, cancers of the surrounding tissues, and leukemia. “It was well known by the early 1960s, the dangers of massive amounts of radiation being dumped into the atmosphere,” astronomer James Schombert told me. “How this was ignored by Orion designers reminds me of the way tobacco companies ignored the lung cancer statistics.” President Kennedy signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, banning nuclear explosions underwater, in the atmosphere, and in space, which killed Project Orion but did not kill the dream of Mars.
¤
For the remainder of the 1960s, the US and the USSR were locked in a race to put men on the moon. When the US won that race with the Apollo program, the USSR turned to research projects on crewed space stations in Earth orbit. After the final moon landing in 1972, the US joined the USSR in that effort. To move supplies and crews back and forth between Earth and orbit, the Soviets employed the same basic rocket technology they had used to put up the Sputnik satellites, and the US went to work on the space shuttle program. (Concurrent with the US space shuttle program, the Soviets were working on a similar shuttle orbiter, the Buran. After one successful unmanned flight in 1988, the program was canceled with the dissolution of the USSR.) While the space shuttle has often been called a marvel of technology, it was also limited and limiting. It proved to be “fragile, expensive, and dangerous,” writes Guy Gugliotta in “Space: The Next Generation,” his 2007 story for National Geographic. “And since it cannot fly beyond low-Earth orbit, it has transformed spaceflight into a series of high-tech cruises to nowhere.” After the Apollo moon missions, von Braun argued fervently for a mission to Mars, and with Ted Taylor’s ideas in mind he thought he could do it using nuclear-powered spacecraft. From the time of Laika’s flight into orbit, it took just over a decade to put men on the moon. During that time of great technological advancement and creativity driven by Cold War competition, if the US had
pushed past the moon instead of investing in the space shuttle, many space industry experts argue, we would have a working outpost on Mars today. Instead of Mars, President Nixon backed the space shuttle program, because in addition to its science mission it could be used to deploy and repair spy satellites. This choice, writes Petranek, “threw the US space program into a long, slow decline and sent [NASA], if not the American people, into a void that lacked passion and vision.”
Decades later President George W. Bush, followed by Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, renewed the US government’s commitment to the space program and set their sights on a future crewed mission to Mars. While the Cold War fueled the competition that led to that string of stunning space achievements between 1957 and 1972, this time around we’re not in a race so much as on a journey. President Bush supported getting to Mars a little bit at a time. But that has proven more sluggish and difficult than it first appeared, which has opened a niche for the development of a robust private space industry in the United States. Leading the way are Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. United Launch Alliance, a joint effort of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, belongs in this company, but unlike the others it is a company built mostly with government money. Like the VFR and Project Orion, what is so exciting about these companies is that they have become the driving force in space exploration because they are not beholden to a ponderous government and its political scrapping for the passing glory of individual and party power, and they incite the kind of competition that fuels and drives research and development, including reusable rockets (the wheelhouse of SpaceX), which promises to drive down costs.