What happened to Laika, the space dog?

A satellite built in four weeks

Sputnik 1 had been in orbit for only a few days when Khrushchev asked for another launch, in time for the fortieth anniversary of the revolution on November 7, 1957. Sergei Korolev’s team had about four weeks. This time the satellite would carry a passenger. Sputnik 2 weighed 508 kilograms, about six times as much as the first, and held a small pressurized cabin with a harness, food in jelly form and sensors for heartbeat and breathing.

The passenger came from the program’s kennel of dogs taken off Moscow’s streets. Trainers preferred strays, reasoning that they already knew hunger and cold, and only small dogs fit the cramped cabins. Laika was about three years old, a mixed breed. Her name is the Russian word for a family of northern hunting dogs, from the verb “to bark.” In the West, newspapers nicknamed the satellite “Muttnik.”

A flight with no return

No one yet knew how to bring a capsule back through the atmosphere, and Sputnik 2 had no heat shield. Laika was launched from Baikonur on November 3, 1957, and the people who prepared her knew she would not come home. The official account, repeated for decades, said that she lived for several days in orbit while her heartbeat was sent to the ground.

The truth came out in October 2002. At the World Space Congress in Houston, the Russian scientist Dimitri Malashenkov said that she died between five and seven hours after launch, from overheating and stress. A satellite assembled in a month had no reliable way to control its temperature. Sputnik 2 stayed in orbit for five more months and burned up in the atmosphere in April 1958.

Was she the first animal in space?

Not the first in space, but the first in orbit. American scientists had sent fruit flies up on a captured V-2 rocket in 1947, and Soviet dogs had made short up-and-down flights since 1951, some of them coming home and some not. Laika was the first living creature to circle the Earth. Her sensors showed that a body could survive the launch and stay alive in weightlessness, which was what the engineers needed to know before risking a person.

The next dogs did come back. On August 19, 1960, Belka and Strelka went into orbit on Sputnik 5 with mice, rats and plants, and landed alive the next day, the first animals to return from orbit. When Strelka later had puppies, Khrushchev sent one of them, Pushinka, to President Kennedy’s daughter Caroline in 1961. Eight months after Belka and Strelka, Yuri Gagarin flew.

How she is remembered

In 1998 Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists who had trained the space dogs, said publicly that he regretted the flight, because it had not taught enough to justify Laika’s death. Ten years later, in April 2008, Russian officials unveiled a monument to her beside the Moscow military research facility that had prepared her flight. Her flight and her death are both part of how Sputnik began the space race.