It has been four weeks since the launch of the first satellite with sound radio signals. He became a worldwide sensation. Delighted with his own successes and the huge interest of the world media, party leader Nikita Khrushchev demanded a new sensation - if possible, by November 7, the 40th anniversary of the Russian revolution. And Laika became a victim of this calculation, since there was not enough time to create a return system to Earth.
Animal advocates protest
The first Russian cosmonauts were recruited in Moscow: they were stray dogs, who were caught, luring them with sausages. The Americans preferred monkeys for their space experiments, but the Russians considered them too sensitive and sociable. They put special spacesuits on their "flying dogs", taught them to be crowded in space capsules and subjected them to strong vibrations, noise and centrifuge tests.
The very first flight was made by the dogs Dezik and Tsygan on July 22, 1951: they took off on an R-1 rocket to an altitude of 110 kilometers, thereby reaching the level where the atmosphere passes into space, and then returned alive. However, not all four-legged astronauts are so lucky. Sergei Korolev, chief designer of the Soviet rocket program, sent a total of 48 animals into space from 1951 to 1961, of which less than half survived. Before time, Dezik also died: when he returned to Earth after a new flight into space, his parachute refused.
Mongrels were considered hardy and accustomed to fighting for survival. The experimental animals were to weigh no more than six kilograms. The quadrupeds were trained for flying for several months, they were accustomed to a jelly-like diet and to stay in cramped quarters for three weeks. Scientists did not even know yet whether living things could survive in space at all. In the fall of 1957, the three-year-old Laika, a cross between a husky and a terrier, was included in the space program along with the dogs Albina and Mushka.
Laika's instructor was Oleg Gazenko. He chose her as a candidate for an orbital flight because of her endurance. “No scientist who does experiments with dogs considers them just like animals. Rather, he sees them as colleagues and friends,”Gazenko said later. While Laika's predecessors only more or less vertically catapulted upwards, and then simply returned, Laika became the first living creature to purposefully fly around our planet. One orbit at a speed of 27 thousand kilometers per hour in an elliptical orbit at an altitude of 225 to 1670 kilometers lasted almost 104 minutes.
The pressure-regulated Sputnik 2 capsule was only 80 centimeters long. Laika was firmly fixed, she could neither stand nor lie down. Telemetry data showed that her heart rate after the start increased threefold, and her blood pressure increased significantly. The New York Times called her "the loneliest and miserable dog in the world." It was originally planned to give Laika poison in orbit ten days later in order to save her from painful death when returning to the atmosphere.
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In the UK, animal advocates have called for a minute of silence in memory of Laika, dog lovers around the world have called the mission animal abuse and expressed condolences over Laika's tragic fate. If they knew about the real cause of Laika's death, then these protests would have been even louder, because the four-legged astronaut after the start lived only a few hours. The truth about her quick demise became known only after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 2002, biologist Dmitry Malashenkov, a scientist from the Sputnik-2 program, said: “Laika died from overheating and stress between the fifth and seventh hours after the start. After the fourth orbit around the Earth, ground control did not register a single sign of a dog's life. Sputnik 2 circled the Earth with a dead dog 2 250 more times until the capsule burned up in the atmosphere 162 days later on April 14, 1958.
National Martyr
As animal advocates continued to protest, the Russians declared Laika a national martyr. Laika can also be seen on the stone plinth of the monument to cosmonauts in Moscow. Since 1997, there has been a memorial plaque on the wall of the Moscow Institute of Aviation and Space Medicine. In many countries, this dog has been immortalized on postage stamps. In 1998 Gazenko said about Laika's painful end: “The more time passes, the more I regret her. The lessons we have learned from that mission are not enough to justify the death of the dog.”
On August 20, 1960, the dogs Strelka and Belka went into space; they were the first to return alive from orbit after 18 orbits around the Earth in the company of 40 mice, two rats and some plants. Later Strelka gave birth to six puppies, and one of them, Pushinka, was presented by Khrushchev in 1962 to the daughter of the American President, Caroline Kennedy. After their death, Belka and Strelka were stuffed, today they can be seen in the Moscow Museum of Cosmonautics. Above them hangs a portrait of Laika.
In January 1961, America celebrated Ham's suborbital flight in a Mercury-Redstone rocket as a major success, but the Soviets were a step further. The results of Laiki's space flight paved the way for man into space: on April 12, 1961, the first man went into space - the Russian Yuri Gagarin. When he returned, he expressed great respect for his four-legged predecessors: "I still don't know who I am: the first man or the last dog in space?"
Michael Ossenkopp