She was promoted to cosmonaut based partly on her size (small) and demeanor (calm), according to the Associated Press. Laika was a stray, picked up from the Moscow streets just over a week before the rocket was set to launch. The flight was meant to test the safety of space travel for humans, but it was a guaranteed suicide mission for the dog, since technology hadn’t advanced as far as the return trip. 3, in 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first-ever living animal into orbit: a dog named Laika. The success of their mission persuaded Soviet authorities to go ahead with the highly risky first space trip by a human, Yury Gagarin, in April 1961.It was a Space Race victory that would have broken Sarah McLachlan’s heart. The first animals to go into space and return alive were a pair of dogs called Belka and Strelka who blasted off in a rocket on Augand returned a day later. The satellite carrying her remains burnt up in the atmosphere five months later, on April 14, 1958, above the Antilles island group. Moscow maintained this fiction for many years. The official version was that she died after eating poison administered in her food to avoid a painful death on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Soviet radio nevertheless kept broadcasting daily updates on her health, insisting all was well. The hope was that Laika would stay alive for eight to 10 days, but instead she died from overheating and dehydration after a few hours. Then suddenly during the ninth orbit of the Earth, the temperature inside the capsule began to soar and reached over 40 degrees celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), due to insufficient insulation from the Sun's rays. "Of course, during blast-off, Laika's heart beat speeded up a lot."īut after three hours, her heart beat was back to normal.
Initially "nothing seemed to be going wrong," Kotovskaya said. Russian scientist Adilya Kotovskaya was charged with preparing Laika for her space mission To get dogs accustomed to the idea of space travel inside a pressurised capsule just 80 centimetres (31 inches) long, Kotovskaya gradually moved them into smaller and smaller cages.
The institute specialises in space science and simulated a flight to Mars in 2010 by making volunteers spend 520 days in isolation. "Now it was time to send one into space," says Kotovskaya, who turned 90 in October but still heads a laboratory at Moscow's Institute of Biomedical Problems. 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." In a well-timed propaganda effort, it fell just before the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on November 7.
"Those nine orbits of Earth made Laika the world's first cosmonaut-sacrificed for the sake of the success of future space missions," says Kotovskaya, who remains proud of her pioneering work as a scientist training Laika and other early space animals.įor Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Laika's voyage was yet another space feat to discomfit the Americans. It followed the first ever Sputnik satellite launch earlier that year.īut things did not go exactly to plan and the dog was only able to survive for a few hours, flying around the Earth nine times. The Soviet Union sent Laika up to spacein a satellite on November 3, 1957-sixty years ago. 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.
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