The canines that made history

Moscow – “I asked her to forgive us and I even cried as I stroked her for the last time,” says 90-year-old Russian biologist Adilya Kotovskaya, recalling the day she bid farewell to her charge Laika.

The former street dog was about to make history as the first living creature to orbit the earth, blasting off on a one-way journey.

The Soviet Union sent Laika up to space in a satellite on November 3, 1957, following the first Sputnik satellite launch earlier that year.

But things did not go to plan and the dog only survived for a few hours, flying around Earth nine times.

“Those nine orbits of Earth made Laika the world’s first cosmonaut,” says Kotovskaya. For Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Laika’s voyage was yet another space feat to discomfit the Americans. In a welltimed propaganda effort, it fell just before the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on November 7.

Kotovskaya recalls that before Laika, several dogs had been blasted up into suborbital space for a few minutes “to check it was possible to survive in weightlessness”.

“Now it was time to send one into space,” says Kotovskaya, who is 90 but still heads a laboratory at Moscow’s Institute of Biomedical Problems. “We knew she was destined to die on the flight, since there was no way to get her back. It wasn’t possible at the time,” said Kotovskaya.

The Sputnik satellite carrying Laika blasted off on a rocket at 5.30am Moscow time from Kazakhstan. Initially “nothing seemed to be going wrong,” Kotovskaya said. Then, suddenly during the ninth orbit of the Earth, the temperature in the capsule went over 40ºC, due to insufficient insulation.

Laika died from overheating and dehydration after a few hours.

The first animals to go into space and return alive were two dogs called Belka and Strelka, who blasted off on August 19, 1960 and returned a day later. The success of their mission persuaded Soviet authorities to go ahead with the first space trip by a human, Yuri Gagarin, in April 1961. –