by Kurt Caswell
Back on the ground, Ugolyok and Veterok emerged from the spacecraft alive but exhausted and disoriented. A later report, writes Siddiqi, notes that the two dogs had lost 30 percent of their body weight and showed signs of “muscular reduction, dehydration, calcium loss, and confusion in readjusting to walking.” According to Turkina, both dogs recovered fully after about ten days and both gave birth to litters of puppies. A Russian writer has claimed that both lost all their hair after returning to Earth, but this claim cannot be substantiated. Whatever became of Ugolyok and Veterok in ensuing years may be less important than their achievement: they set the duration record for space dogs, one that will not be broken until, maybe one day, we take our dogs with us to Mars.
FIVE
¤
A Face in the Window
I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You.
MARTIN BUBER
I and Thou, 1923
Preparations for Laika’s flight began in Moscow at the Institute of Aviation Medicine where she lived and trained. During its ascent and after the satellite entered orbit, the telemetry system on the spent booster would track Laika’s blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, and movements and send that information to a ground station. To measure a dog’s blood pressure remotely required a blood pressure cuff on a timer that Laika wore around her neck. Anyone who has ever walked a dog on a leash knows that its head and neck are powerfully muscled. That, combined with a good coat of protective fur, makes it nearly impossible for a blood pressure cuff to depress a dog’s carotid artery and so measure its blood pressure. To solve this problem, Gazenko and Yazdovsky performed surgery on Laika to draw her carotid artery out and sew it into a flap of skin close to the surface where the blood pressure cuff could make contact. It was a delicate operation, and it required a good ten days to heal.
To record Laika’s heart rate while she was in orbit, Gazenko and Yazdovsky surgically implanted two silver electrode rings, not more than two-tenths of an inch in diameter, beneath the skin on her chest. To these they attached wires and drew those wires beneath her skin up to the top of her back near her shoulders, one on each side. Laika must have looked like a satellite herself, a little sputnik, with those long antenna-like wires emerging from her back. Albina too underwent both of these surgical procedures, because if something happened to Laika in the final moments before launch, Albina would have to fly.
Equipment to record Laika’s movements and respiration did not require surgery. The harness Laika wore around her chest included a gauge that measured the inflation and deflation of her lungs. Her movements were measured by a wire, this one attached to the outside of her harness and wound onto a spindle drum controlled by a spring at the rear of the capsule. When Laika moved away from the drum, she drew the wire out. When she moved toward the drum, the spring engaged and wound up the slack. A sensor recorded the length of the wire, drawn out or wound up, and the ground crew could then determine if she was moving about and roughly where she was: pressed up against the back of the capsule, somewhere in the middle, or far forward, close to the window.
¤
Not long before Laika was flown to Baikonur for launch, Vladimir Yazdovsky took her to his Moscow home to play with his children, because before he was a scientist, or a Soviet, or even a Russian, he was a human being. And human beings are inseparable from dogs. “Laika was a wonderful dog … quiet and very placid,” Yazdovsky writes in his memoirs. “Before her flight, I brought Laika home and showed her to the kids. They were fascinated by her behavior and her beauty. They played with her and pet her. I wanted to do something nice for the dog since she didn’t have much longer to live.”
It was early in winter, and the Moscow night would have been cold with temperatures near freezing. At two years old, Laika was still a young dog, and if she was quiet and placid, she may have entered the house with a slight hesitation mixed with the excitement of seeing so many new people, young people, moreover, the children filled with energy and excitement themselves. What did Laika do during her time in Yazdovsky’s home? How long did she stay? Did the children beg for her to sleep in their rooms? We simply do not know.
Among the stories told about the space dogs of the Soviet program, this is one of the most important. It speaks to Yazdovsky’s humanity, and to the humanity of the entire Soviet team. It tells us that these scientists and engineers cared deeply about these dogs—they loved them—and treated them as friends and colleagues, as working dogs. It tells us that they felt not guilt, I think, but empathy for Laika and her mission. Laika was to be sacrificed, and while I found no record of anyone on the team in real opposition to that sacrifice, there is plenty of evidence that the people who sent her into space did so with a heavy heart.
Yazdovsky was in a leadership position, and he had great authority over the dogs’ training and care. And yet the dogs did not belong to him, and they did not belong to his superior, Korolev. Beyond the fact that the space dogs belonged to themselves (but this is another kind of truth), they belonged to the Soviet Union, to the mission that was the Soviet Union, and now, I think, these many years later, they belong to all of us. If Yazdovsky was able to take Laika home with him, it was a great feat indeed. The Soviet rocket and missile program was as secret as it was successful, and to remove from the kennels the one dog that had been so carefully trained for this historic flight would have been risky and in defiance of regulations. Yet the story persists, substantiated by Yazdovsky himself. When I related the story to Sergei Khrushchev, he admitted he had not heard it before. I asked if he thought it were true. “Taking the dog home?” Khrushchev said. “I don’t think this was possible. How you receive permission to do it? It isn’t reasonable. But then again,” he said, taking a long breath, “it’s Russia. And everything can happen in Russia.”
¤
The space dogs of Soviet Russia were not lab animals, I think. They were cosmonauts, highly trained working dogs with a job to do. While their work was dangerous, and some of them died doing it, so is the work of war dogs, police dogs, search-and-rescue dogs, herding dogs. A dog does not choose its work, but rather it is bred and trained to perform the work it does, the work we need it to do. And work, as the original agreement between humankind and dogs, is the underpinning of the bond we form with them.
Both dog and trainer (or handler) are changed by the experience of training and come naturally into a relationship based on trust. In her beautiful book, Adam’s Task, Vicki Hearne writes, “The better trained a dog is—which is to say, the greater his ‘vocabulary’—the more mutual trust there is, the more dog and human can rely on each other to behave responsibly.” The vocabulary resident in the training adds up to a language too, a language that adds up to a story by which the dog and its human trainer may communicate. Communicating with a dog, or talking with a dog, writes Hearne, “entails care and caretaking. That is part of what respecting one another means.” The dog and its trainer, she writes, “having learned to talk, are now in the presence of and are commanded by love.” This kind of love between a dog and its trainer is different than that between a dog and a pet owner. A pet owner is but shallowly invested in talking to the dog, and often this conversation remains on the surface of what the dog needs (food, a walk) and what the pet owner needs (comfort, companionship). In many cases it is the dog that commands the pet owner, and the pet owner obeys with the hope of receiving love. “Trainers like to say that you haven’t any idea what it is to love a dog until you’ve trained one,” Hearne writes. The trainer commands by love, and the dog obeys by love, but “the ability to exact obedience doesn’t give you the right to do so,” writes Hearne, “it is the willingness to obey that confers the right to command.”
In an interview in Space Dogs, engineer Vladimir Tsvetov, who worked on life-support systems, spoke about the space dogs’ willingness to obey. “What did they feel?” he asks. “It’s hard to say, but these dogs were real professionals. They submitted themselves to training, and perhaps when the sensors wer
e fitted on them, they understood something serious was going on.” Oleg Gazenko agrees: “No one working on the experiments involving animals saw them as just dogs,” he said in Space Dogs. “We saw them, rather, as our colleagues, as friends. It was amazing how, even during the sometimes painful procedures, when some medicine had to be injected, or some hair had to be removed so we could attach the sensors, the dogs never took it as an act of aggression or unfriendliness. On the contrary, they would turn and give you a lick on the cheek.”
It is unhelpful, I think, to regard the space dogs as victims, nor can we think of them as choosing their life among the stars. So what are we left with, when it is so painful to imagine these dogs enduring the stresses of training and then of spaceflight, and some of them dying upon impact with the Earth, or dying in a fiery explosion, and some of them dying in space? We are left with an emptiness that arrives with the fullness and necessity of human endeavor in which dogs, and other animals too, are our companions, our subjects, and sometimes our sacrifices. We love them, and we sacrifice them anyway.
I support the rights of animals to live as they evolved to live, and all animals live in relationship with other animals, humans included. A distinction may be made here between working animals that are bred and trained to work, want to work, even need to work, and animal research, the use of animals for experimentation in scientific laboratories. Much of the opposition centers on animal research, as opposed to using animals for work, but both are unsolvable problems, even as the universe, it seems, allows for such problems. Not every thesis has an antithesis. I do not here wish to take up a position for or against animal research but rather to acknowledge that humankind has benefited greatly from this relationship, including those people who profess to be intolerant, who work toward a world in which no animal is harmed by another. Those people have benefited too.
In Billions and Billions, famed astronomer Carl Sagan writes about his struggle with myelodysplasia, a disease of the bone marrow. After his diagnosis, his doctors told him he did not have long to live unless he underwent a bone marrow transplant. Sagan struggled with the fact that animal research is responsible for the development of this procedure. “In my writings, I have tried to show how closely related we are to other animals,” writes Sagan, “how cruel it is to inflict pain on them, and how morally bankrupt it is to slaughter them to, say, manufacture lipstick. But still, as Dr. [E. Donnell] Thomas put it in his Nobel Prize lecture, ‘The marrow grafting could not have reached clinical application without animal research, first in in-bred rodents and then in out-bred species, particularly the dog.’” The disease eventually took Sagan’s life, and to the end he remained deeply conflicted by benefiting from treatments that relied on animal research. For him, as for many of us, it is an unsolvable problem.
The space dogs flew in the days before the standardization of laws governing the care and treatment of animals, and yet in my research I only found evidence that the team under Korolev and Yazdovsky exemplified what we today hold as the code of the animal researcher:
Refine—research with as little pain and trauma as possible
Reduce—limit the frequency and numbers of animals used in research
Replace—remove the need for animals in research by finding other options
In remarks he made in 2005, the Dalai Lama offered his position regarding animal research, echoing the code of the animal researcher: “I encourage the minimum use of experiments on animals, the absolute minimum amount of pain. Only perform highly necessary experiments, and as little pain as possible. If it must be done, [if that is your path, it is compassionate] to kill out of necessity, but only with empathy. Hold in you the sense of the compassionate: ‘I [acknowledge] that I exploit this animal to bring greater benefit to a great number of sentient beings.’ You must feel the sacrifice, in your heart. It is never made lightly.”
¤
Yazdovsky, Gazenko, and Abram Genin (the man who would later strap his watch to Chernuska), along with the three dogs—Laika, Albina, and Mukha—boarded a Tupolev TU-104 to fly to Tashkent, and from there on to Baikonur on a smaller Ilyushin-14 prop plane for the launch of Sputnik II. The Tupolev TU-104 was a Russian turbojet aircraft with twin engines, one of the first turbojets in operation in the world. It was too big, really, to land on the short runway at Tashkent. It would land at Tashkent, but not without causing Korolev a great deal of worry and stress. And his worry was justified, as on that single plane flew the entire team that was to make Sputnik II possible. If it crashed, a great deal would be lost, maybe everything. Korolev spoke to the pilot before the flight: remember, he said, you are transporting the haut monde of Soviet science and engineering. You must bring them in safely.
At Baikonur, the team was making final preparations, still racing the clock to launch Sputnik II in time to celebrate the Revolution on November 7. For days now, Radio Moscow and the Soviet press had been updating the country about the location of Sputnik I on its journey around the Earth. Everywhere in its path, people watched the skies, hoping to see it pass overhead, and listened to radio broadcasts to hear that haunting sound: “beep, beep, beep, beep.” The press also spoke of a satellite nearing completion, a new satellite that would be even more spectacular than the first because it would be carrying a live animal into space. On October 27, before coming to Baikonur, Laika was “interviewed” on Radio Moscow and, as if on cue, she barked.
With Laika on site at Baikonur, along with her handlers and medical staff, Sputnik II could be prepped and loaded for launch. One night Baikonur’s deputy commander, Anatoly Kirillov, was watching the three little dogs running about the control room. He and his co-workers felt sorry for the “little mongrels,” as he calls them in Roads to Space. “We lamented the fact that one of them would soon die a gruesome death in orbit.” His lamentation was interrupted, however, when someone came rushing into the control room to announce that Sputnik I was about to pass overhead. Korolev, members of the Soviet government, and other personnel assembled outside under the night sky. According to Burgess and Dubbs, people all over the world had been watching Sputnik I pass overhead, but the team that built the satellite had never seen it. At Baikonur, the satellite would be visible only briefly and just above the horizon. It would be difficult to see, but on this night, even if only for a moment, the team had a chance. “When the satellite did appear,” said Kirillov, “it rose high in the sky as it moved from the south-west toward the northeast. It kept us spellbound for several minutes until it finally vanished.”
Ivanovsky also records this moment in The First Steps. “We were staring at the horizon,” he writes. “Minutes passed by… it was not so important whether we were going to see [Sputnik I] or not, it was essential that it was flying high in outer space, and it was an established fact! A few minutes later someone spotted a moving point of light.” There it was, Sputnik I. It looked to Ivanovsky like a firefly aglow on a summer evening. “The firefly seemed to move proudly, confidently, and even at ease,” he writes. “Many people wiped off a tear. I have seen, more than once, the twinkling firefly in the sky, but that first sighting would be stored in my memory forever.”
Most of the assemblage returned to their workstations or to their leisure, Kirillov reports in Roads to Space, but he and a few others lingered in the cold with Korolev. The chief designer stood in silence, his breath visible in the air, gazing up at the night sky as if the satellite might appear again. “Well, my friends,” Korolev finally said, “I’ve known for a long time that satellites could be launched with the help of this.” He put his finger to his temple to indicate the human mind. “But that we actually managed to pull it off using our own heads and hands and this amazing thing,” Korolev then motioned to his heart, “I find absolutely incredible.”
¤
On the morning of October 31 one of the caregivers took Laika out for her morning walk. This was the usual routine. Perhaps they even walked a familiar route, one they had been walking since the day Laika arrived at Baikonur.
For Laika, then, there was nothing extraordinary about this walk, nothing special about this day.
At 10 a.m. Laika was taken to the medical facility for flight preparations. “She was quietly lying on a shining white table,” Ivanovsky writes. “The technicians cleaned her skin with a weak solution of alcohol, carefully combed her hair, and applied iodine water and streptocide powder to the spots where electrodes were implanted under the skin to record the ECG. These procedures took two hours.” Two hours is a long time for a young dog like Laika to allow the team to work on her, and yet she did, so patient and amiable was her character. The procedures were familiar to her too, part of her training. The iodine water and streptocide may have soothed her itchy incisions, now mostly healed, where her carotid artery lay in a flap of skin, where the electrode rings were seated beneath the skin in her chest, where the lead wires emerged from beneath the skin high on her shoulders. The combing, those long, gentle sweeps of the brush and the comber’s hand must have also soothed her. They cared for this dog, even as a mortician might care for the dead, might care for the body soon to be laid to rest, already to be mourned.
It was noon before they finished. The next step was to dress Laika in her vest and harness and attach the waste collection bag. Ivanovsky reports that at this point, Korolev entered the lab dressed in a white lab coat. He examined Laika and the preparations the team had made, all the while speaking softly to her, placing his hands on her body, ruffing her about the neck and scratching her behind the ears. Korolev would remain with Laika until she was ready to be sealed inside her capsule. He attended to each detail of her preparation, checking the work of the team to be sure that once Laika was in orbit the scientists on the ground would receive the data they needed, and to be sure that Laika received whatever she needed.
