Fond memories of pioneer dog sent into space
“I ASKED her to forgive us and I even cried as I stroked her for the last time,” 90-year-old Russian biologist Adilya Kotovskaya said, 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 – 60 years ago. It followed the first-ever Sputnik satellite launch earlier that year.
But things did not go exactly to plan and the dog was only able to survive for a few hours – flying around Earth nine times – rather than the expected eight to 10 days.
“Those nine orbits of Earth made Laika the world’s first cosmonaut – sacrificed for the sake of the success of future space missions,” Kotovskaya said.
She still heads a laboratory at Moscow’s Institute of Biomedical Problems that specialises in space science.
Kotovskaya recalls that before Laika, several dogs had been blasted up into suborbital space for brief periods of a few minutes “to check that it was possible to survive in weightlessness”.
To get dogs accustomed to the idea of space travel inside a pressurised capsule just 80cm long, she gradually moved them into smaller and smaller cages.
The canine candidates spent time in a centrifuge, which simulates the G-forces created when a rocket blasts off, and were exposed to similar noise levels. They even ate space rations. Laika was a mongrel dog aged about three and weighed 6kg. Like all the other candidates for space, she was a female stray found on a Moscow street.
Laika was chosen out of five or six candidates for her resourceful yet docile nature and slightly quizzical expression.
“Of course we knew she was destined to die on the flight, since there was no way to get her back at the time,” Kotovskaya said. The Sputnik satellite carrying Laika blasted off on a rocket at 5.30am Moscow time from Kazakhstan, where the Soviet Union would later base its Baikonur cosmodrome.
Initially nothing seemed to be going wrong, Kotovskaya said.
But during the ninth orbit of the Earth, the temperature inside the capsule began to soar and reached above 40°C, due to insufficient insulation from the Sun.
Laika died from overheating and dehydration after a few hours.
Soviet radio nevertheless kept broadcasting daily updates on her health, insisting all was well.
The official version was that Laika died after eating poison administered in her food to avoid a painful death on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
Moscow maintained this fiction for many years.