The Story Of Laika, The Astronaut Dog

Today let’s do some history: we will tell you about the life of one of the most famous animals of all time, protagonist of books, films and even songs. We are talking about Laika, the first astronaut dog.

A bit of history

It was the year 1957, it was November 3 and the Soviet satellite Sputnik 2 was about to be launched into orbit. The success of the previous mission, which had placed the first artificial satellite around the Earth, Sputnik 1, was still in the air.

At that time there was a real space race in which the two main powers of the moment, the United States and the Soviet Union, competed for the primacy of the conquest of space.

Getting a human to fly a spaceship was the next major goal, but before a person could be launched into space, another kind of living being had to be sent to study the effects a type of travel like that had on him. space. In fact, scientists were convinced that it would be difficult for a living being to survive.

To further study in this area, it was decided to do a test with the dog Laika, who was three years old at the time.

Who was Laika

Laika was a little dog who had not had a lucky life: born in a Moscow street in 1957, the little dog was called   Kudryavka  (“curly”) and only later would she take the name of Laika which means “she who barks”.

In the same year she was recruited by the Soviet space program : she weighed six kilos and was taken to the training center along with two other dogs,  Albina  and  Mushka.

Laika’s training

The three dogs were subjected to a hard training : they were forced to live in a narrow space, inside a space capsule, where they were subjected to tremendous vibrations, noises difficult to bear and movements that mimicked the take-off of a spaceship.

It was seen as their heartbeat and pressure doubled under the effect of these tests. They were then imprisoned in increasingly narrow spaces, sometimes even for twenty days in a row. This type of practice led to the birth of movements in defense of those poor animals.

Once the training was over, each bitch was used in a different experiment: Albina was launched twice aboard a capsule to test her resistance to altitude, while Mushka was used to test life support tools and equipment. Laika would have had the most dangerous experiment: it would have been launched into orbit.

Laika and her journey into space

On October 31, 1957, Laika was introduced aboard Sputnik 2. Before taking off the satellite, the dog’s fur was cleaned with ethanol and sensors were placed along the body capable of monitoring the animal’s reactions. The journey could therefore begin.

As soon as the capsule took off, Laika’s vital constants suffered great changes : her breathing increased dramatically, as did her heart rate, which was more than double.

A technical problem produced a failure of the temperature control system and the interior of the space capsule soon reached 40 ° C.

Due to this temperature increase, Laika’s pulsations dropped to levels much lower than those detected during the ground tests: this situation, according to the experts, denoted that the dog was experiencing a moment of great stress. Despite everything, it seemed that the dog continued to feed with a certain normality.

Yet seven hours after take-off, Laika’s vital constants stopped forever : she was dead. The space capsule continued its journey in orbit for another 163 days, and then burned, upon its return, due to the impact with the Earth’s atmosphere, on April 14, 1958.

The official version of Laika’s journey

The general public had believed the official version that the authorities had given: therefore they thought that Laika was traveling quietly, orbiting up there in space, and that soon she would land on Earth in a parachute. Of course this never happened. During a long time there was a lot of speculation about this story, but it wasn’t until much later, in 2002, that the truth was finally known.

That year, one of the scientists who participated in the experiment reported that Laika had died just a few hours after take-off, due to stress and high temperatures inside the capsule.

In spite of everything, his death was not in vain : from that moment on, in fact, no animals were sent into orbit without first being able to ensure that they could be brought back safely. Laika has since become the symbol of animal defense.