by Kurt Caswell
That Laika barked, or was a barker, is not in question, but what did her barking mean to the Soviet team that trained and worked with her? Is her name an expression of their annoyance or impatience with her and her barking? Or is it a celebration of her personality, her character, an identifier as a vocal dog, a dog that speaks, a dog that communicates because she is in tune with her surroundings and the dogs and people who interact with her? Perhaps the team came to regard Laika’s barking as a quality that distinguished her from the other space dogs in the kennels, a characteristic that made her stand out.
At the time of her flight, Laika weighed thirteen pounds and was about two years old, the ideal size and age for a space dog. Her fur was mostly white, with a darker brown covering her face, and a circle of white running around her black nose and leading up between her eyes to the crown of her head. Her ears stood straight up, like a lot of laika breed dogs, but then bent over at the tips, giving her a friendly look. In video footage of Laika, her bent ears bounce about as she sits or stands, panting, giving her an air of nervous ease. In her eyes, though, is an attendant intelligence, a quiet confidence, the look of a dog that is deeply attuned to the people around her, to what they are doing, and what that means to what she is doing.
A memorial sculpture in Moscow depicts Laika with her tail curled up over her back, another common trait among laika breeds, and this curly tail might be the reason for initially calling her Little Curly. But in most of the photographs of Laika I have seen, her tail hangs straight down like a German shepherd. In these photographs, though, Laika is wearing her flight suit and harness with its waste collection bag. In Inside of a Dog, Alexandra Horowitz writes that dressing a dog in clothing (a sweater or a raincoat, for example) reproduces the feeling of another dog standing over it, pressing down on it in a show of dominance. Perhaps Laika’s posture in these photographs, then—standing frozen in place, her tail dropped straight down—registers discomfort and submission. Presumably when she was free and running about, or out on a walk with her handlers, her tail rolled up into that nice little curl.
Laika’s story comes into the historical and cultural record when she becomes a space dog in training. As a stray living on the streets of Moscow, she was acquired by physician Vladimir Yazdovsky’s team, the man Korolev had put in charge of directing biomedical operations in the emerging space program, which included training and caring for the space dogs. If Laika had been on some other Moscow street that day, or hidden away in a quiet alley, or had she simply lived in some other part of the city, she would have been just another stray, faceless, nameless, living and dying in her time. Her story would have been so unremarkable as to be lost to us, as are the stories of most of the living creatures, humans included, across the ages of the Earth.
While we cannot know much about Laika’s life before she came to Korolev’s kennels, we can imagine it. In his graphic novel Laika, Nick Abadzis does imagine it, and it allows us a window on the early life of the dog that took us to the stars.
In Abadzis’s book, Laika is born into a litter of seven puppies in the house of a government official. The housemaid is ordered to get rid of the pups. One of the female pups becomes her darling, and the housemaid works hard to find her a proper home. A family adopts the pup for their young son. The boy resents the little dog for the way she demands his attention and time, and one night he tosses her into the Moscow River. She swims to the bank, a castoff, and takes to the streets. She befriends another stray dog. When a team of city dogcatchers captures her, they kill her companion in the process. A sympathetic dogcatcher peers in at the pup through the door of her cage and remarks that she “looks like [she’s] been through the wars.” The animal shelter is full, and the pup will have to be euthanized, but then the dogcatcher remembers Yazdovsky, “the air force chap,” who is looking for small stray dogs for some secret government program. That secret government program is, of course, the space program, the program developing missiles and rockets, and training dogs to ride those rockets into space. And so the pup becomes a space dog. The pup becomes Laika.
In Abadzis’s book, the housemaid keeps Laika in her heart and thoughts, even after she is gone, and Laika too bears a memory of the housemaid. Neither knows where the other is, but their bond remains strong, for it is the bond that tethers those who go with those who stay behind. “Never look back,” Abadzis writes as Laika roams the Moscow streets. “Although those you leave behind will still think of you. We do still think of you.”
I have to wonder, when Laika was a street dog in Moscow, did someone feed her, help her, give her a warm place to sleep on a cold winter night? Did a kind restaurateur give her food scraps when she appeared at the alley door? Was that someone a man, a woman, or several men or women? Was Laika befriended by a child? Did these people I am imagining mark that day when Laika, who was always there, was suddenly gone? And living through those next decades, and to the end of their lives, did they know (how could they know?) that the stray dog from the streets they had become so fond of was the same dog they read about in the newspapers and heard about on the radio, the now world-famous dog orbiting the Earth?
Despite the possibility of such a guardian angel attending to Laika on the streets, life inside Korolev’s kennels would have been a marked improvement. Of course, she had to endure space dog training, and eventually the job she was trained to do, but in exchange, she lived in a warm, dry enclosure with wooden floors, with clean bedding of wood shavings or straw. She had the company and social interaction of other space dogs in training, most with similar backgrounds and stories. Her handlers took her out for a walk at least twice a day. And she was watered and fed regularly, a diet that included meat, bone broth, vegetables, fish oil, and milk. Space dogs that were about to fly in a rocket were offered an even better meal that sometimes included a good Russian sausage. This practice was carried forward to cosmonauts and astronauts, who gather even today for a preflight meal and may request anything they desire from the kitchen.
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When Sputnik II went up, the Soviet Union had already beaten the United States into orbit with Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, establishing the Soviets’ technological superiority, and so their supposed superiority as a people and a nation. “Success in space,” writes James Oberg in Red Star Rising, “implied superiority on earth.” This feat is even more astonishing considering the ruinous state of the USSR at the end of World War II. “No other nation in the world was as devastated and crippled by the war,” writes Fordham University space historian Asif Siddiqi in Challenge to Apollo. The war killed some twenty-seven million Russian soldiers and citizens and destroyed some 1,700 cities along with half the nation’s housing. The agricultural system “was close to famine proportions.” Astonishing that out of this kind of ruin, it took the USSR just over a decade to put Sputnik I into orbit. But however astonishing the sight of that satellite in orbit, it was tempered in those days by an equally awesome terror rising out of this new technology, a technology that enabled one nation to destroy another with the touch of a button. As the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the rocket that carried Sputnik into orbit could also carry a nuclear warhead to nearly any place on Earth.
The Soviets called their satellite Prosteyshyy Sputnik-1 (Simplest Satellite-1) or PS-1. The world came to know it as Sputnik, the Russian word for “satellite,” or more precisely “traveling companion” or “following companion.” When an object achieves orbit, it becomes a satellite, for the word “satellite” defines any body in orbit around another. In the Middle Ages “satellite” was used for a person who follows another person superior in rank or status. Astronomers took control of the word in the early days of astronomy, using it to describe natural bodies in orbit, like Earth’s moon, which is a satellite. The successful launch of Sputnik I demanded a distinction between artificial satellites and natural satellites. Soon the word “satellite” fell out of popular use for natural bodies and came to mean “artifi
cial satellite,” almost exclusively. Now the moon is just a moon.
Satellites do not generally follow a circular path around the Earth but rather elliptical paths of varying degrees, just as the Earth and the other planets in our solar system follow elliptical paths around our sun. Perigee is the distance of a satellite at its closest point to the Earth, and apogee is the distance at its farthest point. A satellite’s orbit can change over time too, especially if its perigee is low enough that it drags in the upper atmosphere. Eventually, such atmospheric resistance will bring the satellite down. The International Space Station (ISS), in low-Earth orbit, has a perigee of about 254 miles and an apogee of 258 miles, not much of an elliptical path at all. It is moving very fast, at about 17,500mph, and makes one lap around the Earth every ninety minutes. For comparison, some satellites are in highly elliptical orbits (HEO), somewhere around 600 miles at perigee and over 22,000 miles at apogee. Such satellites spend most of their time moving out to and back from apogee, giving them a longer dwell time over a specific region of the Earth. Nations in extreme northern and southern latitudes often place communications (and other) satellites in HEO. The technique was pioneered by Russian engineers out of necessity, as theirs is a nation with a great deal of landmass in the far north. Weather satellites are placed into geostationary orbits (GEO), which means they orbit at a bit more than 22,000 miles from the Earth. At this distance the satellite’s speed matches the rotation of the Earth, and so, despite the fact that it is moving really fast, from the ground it doesn’t look to be moving at all. Still farther out, the moon has a perigee of 226,000 miles and an apogee of 252,000 miles. In its orbit around the sun, the Earth with all its satellites in tow, natural and artificial, has a perihelion (helios from the Greek for “sun”) of 91.4 million miles and an aphelion of 94.5 million miles.
Sputnik I was a small satellite, a polished metal sphere only twenty-three inches in diameter (a bit more than double the size of a basketball), with four antennas positioned equidistant from each other at their base, canted and pointed back, all in the same direction. Launched on October 4, 1957, Sputnik I broadcast a beeping signal at 20.005 and 40.002 megahertz, easily picked up by government and amateur radio operators worldwide. After twenty-one days, its batteries ran down, and Sputnik I went silent, but it continued to orbit for two more months, most of that time concurrently with Sputnik II.
Premier Khrushchev, on his way home from vacation on the Black Sea—a region of splendid beaches and picturesque mountains still coveted as a vacation spot by Russia’s elite, including President Vladimir Putin—stopped in Kiev to take in news of the launch. He was impressed by the technological feat of Sputnik I, but then there were many technological feats. He did not understand the satellite’s importance until the next day when the world responded. In his essential book Sputnik: The Shock of the Century, Paul Dickson reports that newspapers, TV news, scientists, politicians, practically everybody congratulated the Soviet Union, heralding the event as one of the world’s greatest scientific achievements. It was also lauded as a propaganda stunt to advance the Soviet Union’s position in the world, one that worked most effectively. All over the world people turned out by the millions along the path of the satellite to watch it pass overhead. Millions more picked up its now iconic signal—“beep, beep, beep, beep”—on ham radios or listened to its signal broadcast on a local radio station. Dickson reports that British physicist Sir Bernard Lovell called Sputnik I “about the biggest thing that has happened in scientific history.” And the British science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who also holds his own as a science writer, called the satellite “one of the greatest scientific advances in world history” and announced that it would have “colossal repercussions.”
As a young man, Gil Moore, an American rocket engineer who worked on the Viking and Aerobee projects that were later modified and became the first two stages of the navy’s Vanguard launch vehicle, saw Sputnik I pass overhead in the night sky. Now in his early nineties and wearing a black patch over his left eye, he told me the story sitting at his kitchen table in his Colorado home:
All the people who said they saw Sputnik I are incorrect. The final rocket stage was a great big long cylinder, and it was also in orbit. You could see it tumbling end over end as it reflected light from the sun. People who saw that thought they saw Sputnik itself, but they didn’t. Sputnik was too small to see with the eye. It was the final stage of the rocket that people saw. We were standing outside our home near Las Cruces [New Mexico], my wife and I. And when that sucker came over, my mind was blown. Because here was this enormous flashing coming overhead, and there was no sound. This thing was totally silent. I was not listening to the beep, beep, beep. To me, Sputnik was eerily silent. I thought, oh man, that is an ICBM, the basic launch system. And I thought, those suckers can drop bombs right on our heads. So yeah, yeah we saw it come over. And it was really quite a sight in the sky.
Norm Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, told me he was in his first week of graduate school in aeronautical engineering when someone walked up to him and announced that the Soviets had just launched a sputnik. His response was, What’s a sputnik? Then, Augustine said, “upon learning the answer, coming as it did at the height of the Cold War, it was like a blow to the gut.”
Beyond its military applications, the push to get a satellite into orbit was a science project, part of a global scientific cooperative called the International Geophysical Year (IGY), which ran from July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958. Scientific collaboration between the USSR and the United States was impossible under Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, but his death in 1953 changed that. Sixty-seven countries took part in experiments and advancements in eleven areas of Earth science, including cosmic rays, geomagnetism, gravity, ionospheric physics, meteorology, and solar activity. The timing for such a global collaboration was ideal, because it encompassed the peak of Solar Cycle 19, a roughly eleven-year cycle of changes in the sun’s activity. Solar cycles are numbered starting in 1755 but have been reconstructed back to the beginning of the Holocene, which marks the end of the most recent ice age. As much as the IGY was about collaboration, it was also highly competitive, especially between the USSR and the US. Both countries announced that they would put an artificial satellite into Earth orbit during the IGY, but no one thought the Soviets could do it, and especially not do it first. No one had any idea the Soviets were so far along in their rocket and missile program, Moore told me, because “at the time, the Soviets were incredibly secretive about their work. We knew nothing about it in those days.” The perception was that the US would lead the way into space, because the Soviets were still fastened to the previous century, just a nation of poor farmers and laborers suffering through relentlessly cold winters. When “the USSR announced that they were going to join the IGY,” Moore said, “scientists and engineers in the US mocked them. We thought they didn’t know anything. And then they put up Sputnik.”
Sputnik I left the US scrambling to put up its first satellite, Explorer I, which would not be achieved for nearly three more months. Explorer I was a much smaller satellite, weighing just over thirty pounds, while Sputnik I weighed in at 184 pounds. Sputnik II topped out at over 1,100 pounds. For comparison, the GOES-R weather satellite that I saw under construction in a clean room during my visit to Lockheed Martin’s Denver campus weighs 11,500 pounds. It launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in 2016. In the early days of the Space Race, however, the US did not have a rocket with the kind of power necessary to lift an object as heavy as Sputnik II into orbit, and Khrushchev knew it. Vanguard I, the US’s second satellite, went up on March 17, 1958, and it was even smaller than Explorer I. While it bears the distinction of being the first satellite powered by solar energy, it weighed a mere 3.2 pounds. Khrushchev taunted the US, calling Vanguard I a grapefruit. Even so, while the first two sputniks came down within a couple of months, Vanguard I is still up there, and it will likely remain
in orbit for another couple hundred years.
Some historians have written that President Eisenhower was much less concerned with being first into space than he was in establishing space as open and free to all nations. Such an international agreement, Eisenhower knew, would allow nations to fly satellites over other nations, which would be very useful in spying. Along with other senior officials, Eisenhower had the advantage of reports from a new high-altitude spy plane, the U-2, which revealed that the Soviets were really not technologically or militarily ahead of the US. There was really no good reason to panic; still, his plan was a calculated risk. If the US was first into space and its satellite flew over the USSR, he reasoned, the Soviets might claim the satellite had violated their sovereignty and would then urge a referendum to partition not only the skies over nations, but outer space too. However, if the Soviets were first to fly their satellite over the United States, and the US did not protest, they would then have set a precedent enabling the US to fly satellites over the Soviet Union. What Eisenhower could not have predicted was the reaction of the American people to being beaten into space by the Soviets. In the US, the initial excitement surrounding the technological achievement of Sputnik I was supplanted by fear and anger, which was bad for the American psyche, bad for American security, and bad for Eisenhower’s presidency.
The US had, in fact, two leading rocket programs in operation at the time: the navy’s Project Vanguard (which Gil Moore worked on) and the army’s Redstone missile program, directed by the German engineer Werner von Braun. Eisenhower suspected that putting a satellite into orbit on a military-purposed Redstone missile would incite fear in the Soviet Union, so he endorsed Vanguard’s science mission and told von Braun and his team to stand down. But Vanguard struggled. Attempt after attempt ended in failure. Von Braun’s team launched a rocket weeks in advance of Sputnik I that could have entered orbit, but they pulled it back to comply with the president’s directive. Then Sputnik I went up. “For God’s sake, turn us loose,” von Braun said. Eisenhower finally did, and Explorer I launched into orbit on January 31, 1958, on von Braun’s Redstone rocket, which put the US back on track in what became known as the Space Race.
