Kurt Caswell - Laika's Window

Enos completed his first revolution of the Earth, and on the second trip around, somewhere over western Australia, the spacecraft began to tumble. The thrusters were not all working properly, and later the team would find that a stray piece of metal had clogged a fuel line. But in the moment they knew only that the spacecraft was tumbling, burning fuel erratically, and the problem was getting worse. If they let the ship make its third orbit, it might not have enough fuel to power the thrusters, stabilize the ship’s attitude, and drop it out of orbit and back into Earth’s atmosphere. With only twelve seconds remaining before Enos was committed to a third orbit, the team aborted the mission. They brought the Mercury spacecraft down, Enos still working the levers as he fell through the atmosphere, the spacecraft and capsule heating in its speed until it splashed down in the south Atlantic near Bermuda. The crew of the USS Stormes pulled it from the sea. When the hatch opened, Enos leaped into Dittmer’s arms.

The flight had lasted 3 hours, 21 minutes, and Enos had lived and worked in microgravity for 181 minutes. The team discovered that the temperature inside his capsule had peaked at 106 degrees. Enos would not have been able to tolerate that kind of heat for a third trip around. Still the mission proved that the US was ready to put its first man into orbit, and on February 20, 1962, the great John Glenn achieved that feat.

What became of Enos, the chimp who tested the hardware to make Glenn’s flight possible? He retired to the Holloman chimp colony, where about a year later he died of dysentery. As Burgess and Dubbs note in their research, there is no memorial to Enos, and after a routine necropsy his remains were probably thrown out.

The year before American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon, the Soviet Union sent two Horsfield’s tortoises around it. In their Zond 5 spacecraft, the tortoises, along with some mealworms, wine flies, plants, seeds, and bacteria, were the first living things to make a circumlunar voyage. In the pilot seat rode a 154-pound mannequin with radiation detectors inside.

Soviet chief designer Sergei Korolev had been more interested in a crewed mission to Mars and was working on his gargantuan N-1 rocket to achieve that dream, but his government steered him to the moon. Why? Likely because in 1961 President Kennedy publicly announced America’s commitment to putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The USSR had already racked up a string of firsts in the Space Race, but its leaders wanted to bag the moon first too. Like most everything the Soviets did in those days, their moon program was a state secret. They denied working on the project until 1990, when glasnost pulled back the curtain from a great many Soviet secrets.

Korolev was charged with leading two moon programs, one to take a crewed spacecraft around the moon and back to Earth, and the other to land a crew on the surface of the moon. His death in 1966 was a major setback in those efforts, but his two teams kept on with their work. Trial after trial of Korolev’s N-1 rocket resulted in explosion and catastrophe on the launchpad or just above it. By using a smaller rocket to launch the Zond 5 , the circumlunar project was going along rather well. The US would not equal that flight for another three months with Apollo 8 , which flew a crew of three astronauts around the moon.

The Horsfield’s tortoise, sometimes called the Russian tortoise, makes a great aquarium pet because it is small (between five and ten inches long) and requires little food. The male Horsfield’s is known for its wild courtship display, shucking and diving with his head and biting the front legs of the female, little tortoise kisses, to get her in the mood. If she accepts him, he will mount her from behind and sound a series of high-pitched barbaric squeaks.

On the night of September 14, 1968, the tortoises went up from Baikonur, the Soviet Union’s massive spaceport in Kazakhstan. Temperatures were mild, not too hot and not too cold, and the vast and empty desert was lit by the afterglow of the cosmos. The rocket blasted off and rose into the starry sky above the desert, an upside-down candle ascending into the heavens. At the time of launch, the tortoises had already been in the spacecraft for twelve days with no food. Once in Earth orbit, the team parked the Zond 5 for a while as they made a series of system checks, then the third-stage engine fired, and the spacecraft moved onward to the moon.

On September 18 the spacecraft rounded the moon, flying 1,200 miles above its surface, and headed straight back. It did not enter orbit. An attitude control sensor had failed on the flight out, and now on the return a second sensor failed, resulting in difficulty guiding the spacecraft as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere. It would have to make what NASA called “a direct ballistic entry,” like a bullet breaking through. The ground team would not know precisely where the capsule was going to land until it came very near to landing. It splashed down in the Indian Ocean on September 21. A Soviet Academy of Sciences ship, the Borovichi , located the capsule bobbing in heavy seas and recovered it while a US Navy patrol looked on. Just what were the Soviets up to? Oh, probably just beating the Americans in the Space Race again.

The capsule arrived in Moscow on October 7. It had been a good month now since the tortoises were sealed inside without food. When the Soviet team finally opened the capsule on October 11, they found that the tortoises had lost 10 percent of their body weight, but they were generally healthy and had powerful appetites.

In 1972 five pocket mice flew to the moon on Apollo 17 , the final moon mission. Because pocket mice are desert dwellers and do not require water (they take in all the water they need from their food), they make excellent space travelers. These mice, one female and four males—affectionately called Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey by the astronauts who flew that mission—were to test the effects of high-energy radiation on the body, especially on the retina of the eyes and on the brain and skin. Each mouse had a radiation detector surgically implanted into its brain. You can imagine these devices like little hats on the top of their heads, transforming the mice into cyborgs.

High-energy radiation, or cosmic radiation, strikes the Earth without cease. These particles are mostly hydrogen nuclei traveling at near the speed of light. Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere slow these particles down, and they give their energy to them, so that we are perfectly safe down here on the surface. Life would not have evolved and flourished here without shielding from cosmic radiation. Outside this shield, these particles penetrate living tissue and damage or destroy it. As the Apollo moon missions were operating outside Earth’s protective shielding, they were ideal for research on the effects of cosmic radiation on travelers from Earth.

Apollo 17 (and the other Apollo flights) consisted of a three-man crew: commander Eugene Cernan and pilot and geologist Harrison Schmitt would descend to the moon’s surface, while pilot Ronald Evans would remain with the mice in the command module in orbit around the moon. The mice required nothing from the astronauts. They were set up in a sealed aluminum canister, inside of which were individual tubes, one for each mouse and one empty tube to help with ventilation. The tubes protected the mice from tumbling about too severely, but they were free to move inside the tube, where they feasted on a prepared seed mixture (about thirty grams per day each). An identical canister with five other mice would remain at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California as a control study.