![]() ![]() But, she was contained in the capsule for three days and three hours, roughly,” Caswell tells Inverse. “They finally launch, and three hours later, she's dead. So many problems that the rocket sat on the ground for three days prior to launch with Laika sealed inside. He explained that after Laika was sealed in her capsule and it was placed on top of the rocket, there were a number of problems pre-launch that needed to be addressed. Kurt Caswell, author of Laika’s Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog and professor of creative writing and literature in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, explained that Laika likely died even before the capsule overheated. As the Americans told it, the tale took on a darker hue she died quickly when the chamber where she was located overheated, and she burned to death.Īs it turns out, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images Laika’s journeyĪs the Soviets liked to tell the story of Laika’s space journey, it was a smooth ascent, and she survived aboard Sputnik 2 for 7 days, eventually dying painlessly of a lack of oxygen - quickly, in just 15 seconds. (Fish, frogs, newts, and rats were all also sent to space in this era.) Sputnik 2, the first canine - or live animal - orbital flight, was about in the middle of that. In total, there have been seats for 57 dogs in USSR space flights, though some dogs have flown multiple times. She survived, only to be euthanized shortly thereafter to have her brain examined posthumously. The French even sent a cat, Félicette, into suborbital space. Thereafter, both the Soviets and the US sent dogs and monkeys, respectively, into suborbital space until Laika became the first to enter into orbit. Albert II was the first animal to cross the Karman line when he traveled 83 miles into space aboard a V-2 sounding rocket on June 14, 1949, but died upon landing. He, unfortunately, died from suffocation before landing. Later, Albert, a rhesus macaque, was blasted 39 miles into the atmosphere on June 11, 1948. The fruit flies were returned safely by parachute to study the effects of radiation on DNA. In 1947, before mammals, the United States sent fruit flies to altitudes greater than 62 miles (the boundary of space recognized by many agencies, known as the Karman line) aboard a V-2 rocket. Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Early animal experiments in spaceĪs it turns out, Laika was not the first dog that the USSR sent into space, and was far from the first animal sent into space - but all launches before never went into orbit. Sam, a rhesus monkey sent to space in 1959. “This was sort of just proof of concept that no, nothing magic or weird happens when you spend a few minutes in space in freefall,” he adds. “So, a lot of the doctors were very conservative about it.” “At that point, there was a lot of speculation that a living being would immediately die if it was in weightlessness,” McDowell tells Inverse. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, explains that animals were sent into space to measure their physiological responses. There was little known about the impact of being in space on living creatures - especially humans. ![]() The motivation for sending Laika to space was a noble one. The story of Laika’s journey to space is forged in history, but like many Soviet space tales, is not without controversy. Unlike the Sputnik 1 probe that had flown to space a month earlier, Sputnik 2 had a separate chamber (with a window) to carry a living creature - Laika. When she was just two or three years old, she did what no human had done before - she orbited Earth aboard Sputnik 2, which launched 65 years ago today on November 3, 1957. A lynchpin in the history of space travel and exploration, she may be equal parts hero and victim. In the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Moscow is a statue of a small mutt, Laika. ![]()
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