On November 3, 1957 the world tuned in to the distant beep-beep-beep of the Sputnik II orbiting satellite. It was the second object launched into outer space by the Soviet Union, but it was the first to carry a living passenger. On board was the dog, Laika.
She would also be the first living being to die in space.
Laika is remembered as the first to reach outer space, but she began her brief life in far humbler circumstances:
She was a mutt and a stray, living on the streets of Moscow and begging for food. When she was about three years old, she was found by a scientist in the Russian space program and brought to Star City, where she would begin her new life as first-cosmonaut-in-training.
They gave her the name ‘Laika’ there at Star City, (it means simply ‘Bark’ in Russian), but they usually called her ‘Little Bug’ or ‘Little Lemon’.
She was well fed for the first time in her life and had a warm bed to sleep in every night. These, one can only imagine, were the happiest days of her life.
She lived with two other dogs, Albina and Mushka, and they spent their days undergoing tests on their reflexes, their heart rates, their hearing, their breathing.
Albina and Mushka both survived brief sub-orbital trips up in Soviet rockets prior to Laika's fateful voyage, but the real mission was saved for Laika.
In the end, it was her most unheroic trait that earmarked her for destiny - she was the calmest, the best behaved, the quietest.
Sputnik II weighed more than 1,000 pounds and was filled with instruments and antennae and insulation and electrical wiring. In the very center of the craft, however, a small cavity, just large enough for a smallish dog to stand or lie down in (but not turn around), was reserved for Laika.
To prepare her for the cramped quarters, she was kept in progressively smaller cages - in the dark - for two weeks at a time.
To accustom her to the stress and shaking of the flight, her cage was routinely agitated hydraulically or placed in the massive centrifuge used to train the human cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, who would go up a year later.
To simulate the noise of liftoff, speakers were positioned outside her closed box that periodically played - at full, deafening volume - a recording of a rocket during launch.
She was fed a nutrient enriched jelly and given water, but the close quarters stopped her from urinating or defecating.
Her pulse was monitored at all times and ran high, but within the bounds of safety.
She was adjudged to have performed admirably, under the circumstances.
Three days before launch, Laika was gently bathed and groomed, fitted with a harness and electrodes to monitor her vital signs, and placed into the padded cavity of the Sputnik II capsule at the launch site. The capsule was sealed. Laika would never see the sky or the sun or another living thing ever again.
It was so cold that they had to attach a hose to the capsule to pipe in heated air. Laika was restless.
Launch! Half a ton of steel and fire hurtled into space at twenty thousand miles an hour. Laika, the stray-dog cosmonaut, the fastest thing alive.
The capsule slung around the Earth for five and a half months (2,570 orbits) before it burned up in a flash of chrome and vermillion upon re-entry. Re-entry was on April 14th, 1958 - the 46th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic and the 93rd of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln - an infamous day, April the 14th.
Of course, Laika was dead long before that day.
She was never meant to survive the trip. There was never any consideration of recovering Laika or the capsule itself. Hers was always going to be a one-way flight.
It has never been entirely clear how long Laika was able to stay alive inside her Sputnik (Russian for ‘Companion’), but it was not longer than ten days. After ten days there would be no more food or water and a poisoned dose of her nutritional jelly would have euthanized her.
She may have survived as many as four days before dying of stress and heat. Recently, a Russian scientist who worked at Star City alleged that Laika lived little more than a few hours following her fiery ascent up Jacob’s Ladder.
He said that he has always regretted what they did to Laika.
However long she stayed alive in her dark-little-fastest-flying-coffin, she has become one of the most famous dogs in history. Her face has graced the postage stamps of several countries; her image adorns a Russian monument to all those who died in the pursuit of space; she has been featured in novels and songs.
That song by Domenico Modugno, ‘Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu’, was likely written in 1958 (only months after Laika's voyage) as a kind of homage to Laika.
I originally had a whole thing about the lyrics here, but I think you’ll feel it more if I leave it at this: in the song, the narrator is exclaiming how happy he is to be flying away from everything and into infinite space. It’s a metaphor for a love affair, sure, but it’s filled with a kind of pathos as the singer moves further and further away from the Earth and everything he has ever known there, singing all the while.
Here's a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-DVi0ugelc&feature=player_embedded
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