Laika's Window

by Kurt Caswell

  Before the successful launch of Explorer I, though, Khrushchev planned to stun the world again with Soviet power and ingenuity. He ordered the launch of a second satellite, Sputnik II, to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The satellite was also a science laboratory, as Laika, along with Sputnik II’s instruments, would return data to the USSR essential to understanding the conditions in Earth orbit, data crucial to finding out if and how a human being could survive in space. The Soviet news agency TASS issued this statement in a press release: “Artificial earth satellites will pave the way to interplanetary travel, and apparently our contemporaries will witness how the freed and conscientious labor of the people of the new socialist society makes the most daring dreams of mankind a reality.”

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  During her flight and for decades after, Laika was one of the most famous dogs in the world. She appears on most every list of famous dogs, along with Lassie, Hachiko, and Rin Tin Tin; and she is listed among Time magazine’s fifteen “most influential animals that ever lived,” joining the company of Alexander the Great’s war horse, Bucephalus; Dian Fossey’s favored mountain gorilla, Digit; and the world’s first successfully cloned adult mammal, Dolly the sheep. The Soviet Union issued a postage stamp in Laika’s honor, and so did Albania, Benin, North Korea, the Emirate of Sharjah (part of the United Arab Emirates), East Germany (now the reunited nation of Germany), Guyana, Hungary, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Poland, and Romania. Laika-brand cigarettes were hugely popular in the Soviet Union and in other countries. Her image was featured on cigarette cases, cigar bands, matchboxes, postcards, posters, in newspaper and magazine drawings and cartoons, on boxes of chocolates and chocolate wrapping papers, lapel pins and badges, handkerchiefs, confectionery tins, playing cards, commemorative plates, desktop sculptures, and porcelain figurines. In Japan, Laika’s image was featured on a child’s tin watering can, a spinning top, and a bucket. In the US she was featured on a child’s piggy bank, or “Sputnik Bank,” and on a child’s toy plastic helmet with two metal spring antennas, the “Wee Beep Sputnik” helmet. In West Germany a child’s mechanical toy featured Laika in a sputnik orbiting the Earth. And in Mexico, a tin serving tray pictured Betty Boop walking Laika on a leash across the surface of an alien world, possibly the moon. Laika has been the subject of poems, children’s books, at least one graphic novel, a few books of nonfiction, songs, and music videos. Years later, circulating on the internet, is the curious theory that Scooby-Doo is an escaped Soviet space dog, perhaps in Laika’s image, and you can see such a space dog running across the screen in the 2014 Marvel Studios movie Guardians of the Galaxy as part of the cosmic collection of a character called The Collector.

  Laika is the only nonhuman represented on the Monument to the Conquerors of Space at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow. Positioned on the roof of the museum, the monument is a 350-foot-high titanium sculpture of a rocket leading a plume of exhaust and smoke from its engines. The monument is wrapped in a bas-relief of the heroes of the Soviet space program. I stood before the monument in the summer of 2016 and walked around its base. It was a particularly cool day, and it had only just stopped raining. Through my reading I had come to know the names and faces of a number of the greatest figures in the early Soviet space program, but none of them was recognizable here. These were representations of a generalized Soviet hero, generalized faces in various generalized poses and actions. Laika, however, was recognizable, sitting in the capsule that took her to the stars. She is positioned over the shoulders of a man who is kneeling and looking at a set of drawings or plans, and beneath the raised arm of another man who, along with the rocket behind him, points the way to the stars. That monument—on which Laika is a central figure—writes Olesya Turkina in Soviet Space Dogs, “came to symbolise the hopes and dreams of an entire generation of Soviet people.”

  In the West, too, Laika lived large in the public imagination. For many, she was proof that the Soviet Union now possessed the power to destroy the United States, or any other country for that matter, from space. And she was a symbol of Soviet godlessness, a cruel sacrifice to the technological advance of a state fallen from God’s grace. The scientific achievement of the Soviet Union became lost in the story of Laika herself, as a global debate broke out about the ethical use of animals in research, fueled primarily by anti-Soviet propaganda from the National Canine Defense League (now Dogs Trust) and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, both in the United Kingdom. Other animal rights organizations joined in to encourage protests at Soviet embassies worldwide. No matter that, worldwide and in the West where these protests originated, animals were likewise being used in medical and scientific research. To keep pace with the Soviets, the US military was sending not dogs but monkeys, and eventually chimpanzees, into space in experimental rockets, many of which crashed and burned up on the desert plains of eastern New Mexico. But most people do not care about monkeys and chimps the way they care about dogs, and so Laika—a stray dog in a rocket ship, dead and exiled, orbiting the Earth for months—became a symbol of the USSR’s power and technological superiority, and in the West a symbol of that power’s cruelty and indifference to the value of life, human and animal.

  Despite the outcry in the West against the Soviets for their treatment of Laika, she was beloved by the team working on Sputnik II, as were all the space dogs in the program. These were the days before standards and laws governing the treatment of animals in labs, but even without such laws, the Soviets took great care of their space dogs as well as the other animals they used in scientific research. Stories of the Soviet scientists’ and engineers’ attachment to and affinity for the dogs abound, Laika chief among them. In a 2006 telephone interview with Chris Dubbs, co-author of Animals in Space, NASA’s chief veterinary officer, Joseph Bielitzki, spoke about the way Russians work with animals, in the past and the present. Russian animal care programs, Bielitzki said, were “more personal than [the US],” adding that “you can’t work with the same animals for almost two years, as they did, without becoming emotionally attached to them.” Vladimir Yazdovsky broke strict regulations to take Laika home to play with his children not long before her scheduled launch. In his memoirs he writes that he “wanted to do something nice for the dog since she didn’t have much longer to live.” And in 1998 Oleg Gazenko, who worked under Yazdovsky, expressed his sadness and regret for sending Laika to her death: “Work with animals is a source of suffering to us all…. The more time passes, the more I am sorry about [Laika’s death]. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.”

  But it was the death of Laika that positioned her so firmly in the cultural memory of a generation, not just in the Soviet Union but in the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other countries. While her story raises questions about the ethical treatment of animals in research, it may in fact have helped change the way we think about such animals, and the way we treat them. Laika may have helped change the way we think about the Space Race. Cathleen Lewis, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, told me that in the 1940s and 1950s “we were just stumbling into the space age,” and the space age was a highly mechanized and technological endeavor. Then “we sent a living being into space. It wasn’t an anonymous cage rat, but a dog. Dogs are essential to human evolution. They taught us a lot about our social behavior. To have an animal like a dog sent into space really shifted the Space Race, gave it a less military, less threatening face.”

  While Laika may have made a highly mechanized and technological endeavor more human, she also became inseparable from it. Without her capsule to provide oxygen, proper atmospheric pressure, and temperature control, Laika would not have survived in orbit for any length of time. That, along with the sensors implanted in her body and attached to the satellite for data transmission back to Earth, we have in Laika the union of the biological and the technological. The satellite was built around the dog, not the
other way around, and in it she became part of it, just as it became part of her. Its fate was bound to her fate, satellite and dog.

  Within three years after Laika’s flight, NASA scientists Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline coined the term “cyborg” to describe a biological organism integrated with artificial components or with technology. The purpose of such an integration, as they saw it, was not to make the biological organism more like a machine but to make it a better version of itself. In their 1960 paper “Cyborgs and Space,” Clynes and Kline asserted that instead of building complex environments inside which humans might travel in space and live on alien worlds, the better path was to alter humans so that we might manage such environments. Integration with technology would free us from it, they surmised, allowing us “to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.” In altering the way our physical bodies work and the kinds of environments we can tolerate, we would alter too the meaning of being human. We would broaden and expand what we call the human spirit. “Space travel challenges mankind not only technologically but also spiritually,” Clynes and Kline wrote, “in that it invites man to take an active part in his own biological evolution.”

  We have become so dependent on technology in the twenty-first century that we can hardly get through a day without it. We have developed artificial components for the body: knees, hips, pacemakers, heart valves, and in some cases computer chips. We are attached to our automobiles, which are increasingly driven by computers and integrated with our handheld computers, our mobile phones. We are inseparable from those mobile phones, which serve our social, economic, political, and educational needs. Our phones are our identity, or at least our identity—who we say we are, and who we wish to be—is expressed through our phones. We are so integrated with our technology that it may soon be appropriate to call ourselves cyborgs. Laika in her capsule may stand as an origin point and as a symbol for this new way of being in the world, this new way of being in the cosmos.

  Laika’s story also raises questions about human empathy, about what we are willing to risk in the spirit of science and exploration, both of animals and of ourselves. It offers a glimpse into the hearts of the Soviet scientists and engineers who worked with her, and into the hearts of us all. The scientists’ relationship with Laika tells us something, perhaps, of what has changed for us in the years since Sputnik. What does it mean, for example, that Cold War Soviet scientists were not inhumane and heartless, as Western protesters insisted and the press reported, but were, in fact, caring, sensitive, and empathetic?

  The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas tells us that it is in face-to-face relationships that empathy, and thus ethical behavior, becomes possible. To face another human being, to encounter them, is to come into an ethical relationship with them. Ethical behavior toward other human beings extends, it seems to me, to ethical behavior toward other species and toward the whole of nature. In this light, it is essential, I think, to consider the way we communicate and build personal relationships with other human beings in the twenty-first century. Even as our technologies enhance us, possibly make us better, we must also ask what we may have lost. Our obsessive use of communications technologies—chiefly smartphones and computers with internet access—has brought the world together, but it has also separated us, cutting us off from the kind of face-to-face encounters that Levinas writes about. What are the results of this recent phenomenon? What is its future? How do these technologies advance us as we become more and more dependent on them? How do they limit us?

  With all these considerations, Laika really belongs to the world. She was a Russian dog with a Russian heart, a stray from the streets of Moscow, a creature of the Soviet experiment, but once lofted into space she was not fixed or bound to any one place, to any one people. She belonged to no one and to everyone, the first living creature from Earth to go where no nation, no corporation, and no individual has any claim. In looking at Laika’s story and at the scientists and engineers who worked with her, perhaps we can better understand human empathy—its source, its importance, and the dangers of its reduction and loss—in order to posit that empathy is essential to caring for our world, to maintaining it as a place where we may all live healthy, productive lives as part of what the writer Wendell Berry has called “the feast of creation.”

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  When the Soviet team went to select a space dog to launch in Sputnik II, Laika earned high marks. In her training she managed the extreme conditions of the centrifuge and the vibration table, and she kept a calm and even disposition during prolonged periods of isolation in the training capsule (up to twenty days). She did not become aggressive or fight with her kennel mates, as so many smaller dogs are prone to do. The women and men who worked with her describe her as sweet-natured, patient, and determined, a dog that wanted to please, a dog talented in adapting to the place and the people with whom she found herself. She was a survivor, a quality that saw her through that hard life on the streets and, then, the rigorous training in the space dog program. Indeed, Korolev and Yazdovsky both knew that street dogs made the best space dogs, because they were tough, scrappy, and they could endure extremes of temperature, hunger, and isolation.

  And yet Laika was not the most qualified dog for Sputnik II. The team felt strongly that a dog called Albina was the best choice. Albina was a favorite among the scientists and engineers, “a celebrity who had twice been in research rockets at the height of hundreds of kilometers,” writes engineer Oleg Ivanovsky (under the pen name Aleksei Ivanov) in The First Steps: An Engineer’s Notes. Albina had flown both times with a dog called Kozyavka, or Little Gnat, in June 1956. Having already proven herself in flight, she was the perfect choice for Sputnik II, but had she not risked enough? Didn’t she deserve something for the contribution she had already made? Retirement, perhaps, a soft bed in a warm house? Albina had something else going for her too: she had just given birth to a litter of puppies, three little pups, one of which looked a lot like Laika. Yazdovsky thought it too cruel to take the mother from her pups and subject her again to the risks of rocket flight.

  Ordinary rocket flight was risk enough, but Sputnik II was not going to be an ordinary flight. Khrushchev had ordered the launch for no later than November 7, 1957, in time to celebrate the Bolshevik Revolution, which was about a month after Sputnik I. The Soviets knew how to send a dog to the edge of space on a rocket and bring it back safely with a system of parachutes (they had achieved this many times), but they did not know how to return a dog from orbit. It had never been done before. The know-how and hardware just didn’t exist. That kind of research and development took time, and the Soviet team was in a mad race against the clock, and against the United States, to again achieve the impossible. So unlike previous and later rocket trials using dogs, the dog chosen to fly on Sputnik II was not just taking a risk, it was never coming back. The dog chosen for Sputnik II was going to die in space or perhaps on the ride into space. Whatever, it was going to die.

  So which dog to choose: Laika or Albina?

  For the team, it was a tough choice, but a choice had to be made. Ivanovsky records this moment in The First Steps: “The great majority inclined to send Laika into space. Everyone knew that the animal would die, and there was no way to bring her back to Earth, because we did not know how to do that. So it was particularly painful to send Albina, everyone’s darling, to her death. Thus, Laika became the first.” By the first, Ivanovsky means “the primary,” as all the space dogs scheduled to fly were assigned a second, or a backup, in case something happened to prevent the primary from flying. Albina, then, was named Laika’s second. Ivanovsky’s words also mean that Laika would be first into orbit, first for the glory of the Soviet Union, and first for all time. And she would also be the first, and the only, dog in the Soviet space dog program to be sent to her death.

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  Laika’s capsule on Sputnik II contained a small, round window. While the satellite, along with Laika and her capsule, were destroyed on reentry, the window is plainly vi
sible in photographs and drawings, and in a replica at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow. The window, Asif Siddiqi told me, measured about 6.3 inches in diameter and was made of transparent thermoplastic, called Perspex. Questions surrounding the window’s purpose stand as a lodestar for this book, out of which a central metaphor has arisen. Wearing a flight suit to secure the sensors implanted in her body, Laika was positioned inside a small chamber within the capsule so that, while she was able to stand, to sit, to lie down, and to move about a little, she was unable to turn around. The design meant that she faced the window looking out. Was this the sole reason for the window, so that Laika could look out at the Earth as she left it? Or did scientists believe that the view or, more so, the entry of natural light would help calm her as she endured the thrust of the rocket and then the strange sensation of weightlessness? Or was the window installed to serve the scientists only, to monitor Laika before she was loaded onto the rocket? What were these scientists’ intentions? After launch, of course, the sole user of the window was Laika, a window through which she looked at what? Did Laika take in the first view of Earth from space and look beyond it into the cosmos? Could she in fact see out? And if she could, what did she see from up there? What did she see down here? Or was the view from Laika’s window occluded by darkness, blocked by the payload fairing protecting the satellite as it rose into orbit? More specifically, did the Soviet team remove the payload fairing after Sputnik II achieved orbit?