Kurt Caswell - Laika's Window

Studying the water bear as it endures the vacuum of space may help answer questions about the origin of life on Earth. Some scientists see evidence for Mars and Earth sharing in the origin of life during the planet-forming age of our solar system, and it may be that life persists on Mars, deep underground—we do not yet know. In 2016 scientists working in Greenland found the oldest fossils yet known—communities of bacteria, known as stromatolites—and they were alive at a time when Earth and Mars were much the same. So if life emerged in the conditions on Earth at that time, it could have emerged on Mars too. Or it’s possible that life began on Mars and then was transferred or migrated to Earth. Species on Earth have always traveled across great distances borne on the wind, flushed down great rivers, riding rafts of flotsam across the seas from continent to continent. So why not through space? Transpermia, as the theory is known, takes into account the possibility that life may travel through space from planet to planet, or even between solar systems. Perhaps life is in the business of traveling about our galaxy, traveling about the cosmos, and seeding suitable planets as it goes. Perhaps the water bear came to Earth from somewhere else. Perhaps it is not to the Earth alone that we belong, but to the great cosmos itself.

In 2011 the California-based Planetary Society, working with scientists in Russia and Germany, set up the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment to test this theory of transpermia by sending the water bear (along with samples of various bacteria, eukaryotes, and archaea) to Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars. In fact, so likely was it that at least some of the samples would survive deep-space travel and arrive at Phobos alive that the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return positioned itself against the mission. The probability that the samples would contaminate Phobos, and possibly Mars, they said, was too high to risk the science at all. The mission flew anyway, but the spacecraft stalled out in Earth orbit. A programming error on the Russian rocket made it impossible to boost it out of orbit and on to Mars. It eventually burned up on reentry, with fragments crashing into the Pacific Ocean near Chile.

It is impossible to hear these stories of animals flung into space—whether they lived or died—and not feel something for them, to come face-to-face with the plight of these beings, some of them very much like us, some of them with whom we share our daily lives. It is impossible to hear how these animals were taken from city streets and out of jungles, where they had lived by their own will and interests, and not grieve for them. It is impossible to look at photographs of them, their bodies confined by little space suits, strapped into metal harnesses to keep them “safe,” their faces bearing the g-force of rocket flight, or in a contortion of enforced anesthesia from which they never will awake, and not wonder how human beings could do such things to them. The photographs are immeasurably sad.

These stories and photographs return us to a central tension in this book, which is a central tension in us all. On one hand, we want to have what we want, go where we want, do what we want, at whatever cost; on the other hand, we love the living beings of the Earth, as we love ourselves, and we want that same care and love returned upon us. Caught in the middle of this tension, we suffer. And we suffer more, I think, to feel the suffering of another than we do even in suffering ourselves. I do not here speak of physical pain. It is not the body’s suffering we cannot bear, not the physical death of these animals in the fiery crashes of rockets in flight, abandoned at sea in sinking capsules, expiring in the desert sun. What we cannot bear is the feeling of loneliness that rushes in when we hear their stories.

When we hear the stories of animals flung into space, we have to ask: Were they lonely when they died? Would I be lonely? In the end, I think, we want to know that we were not alone in life or in death, that our people, who traveled with us through our journey on Earth, will travel with us on the other side, our orbits each following the other to whatever end, whatever eternity. Somewhere inside us, we all understand that what we have is not ours, that this Earth, and all its beauties and darknesses, was not meant to last forever, that everything we’ve ever known will one day vanish without a trace. This kind of loneliness drains the world of color, drags time behind it like an anchor, and pushes the body into an unrecoverable lethargy where the very air—hot or cold—becomes unbearable, and the Earth seems a lifeless rock, a world of unbroken wastes and desolation. It is, for the lonely, as if the Earth were placed here, and we born upon it, just to ripen loneliness.

In their book Animal Astronauts , Clyde Bergwin and William Coleman write that a reporter once asked US Navy captain Ashton Graybiel how monkeys were selected and trained for their flights, and how these monkeys responded to the training. Did they train willingly, or were they forced? “These monkeys are almost volunteers,” Graybiel said. “During the preflight testing, we didn’t force a monkey to take a test if it objected to it.” This is some consolation, but I think we have to accept that unless a monkey is doing what monkeys evolved to do, they probably don’t want to be doing it. In the 1950s during the height of US rocket tests with monkeys, people from all over the world wrote to the air force volunteering themselves as replacements. People wanted to go up in those rockets so that the monkeys didn’t have to. A few volunteered to help repay a debt they felt they owed, men serving time in prison, for example. Send me instead of a monkey, they were saying. The monkey deserves to have its life. Surely my life might be used for something more purposeful than sitting in a prison and spending taxpayer dollars. The air force declined.

In fall 1957, under the leadership of Colonel Sergei Korolev, an engineer in the Red Army, a secret team of Soviet rocket scientists and engineers went to work on Sputnik II . With this second satellite, Khrushchev wanted something new, something special, something that would again demand the world’s attention. Drawing from the space dog training and flight program already in place, Korolev suggested putting a dog into orbit. The anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution was only a month away, and after the success of Sputnik I the team had been released for a needed vacation. Korolev recalled them immediately to make good on Khrushchev’s order. The team did not have time to develop a system to bring the satellite and the dog back safely. Their order was just to get the satellite up and beat the Americans again.

While this is the way the story unfolds in most accounts, Sergei Khrushchev maintains that it was not his father pushing for the hasty launch of Sputnik II but Korolev. “Historians in the rocket field ascribe [the launch deadline for Sputnik II ] to Father, and even say that he ordered it,” Khrushchev writes in his biography of his father, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower . “I find that very unlikely. Father understood that as far as technical matters were concerned, he was not in charge. Everything depended on the chief designer, and not even on him, but on the degree of readiness for launch…. My sense is that Father asked Sergei Pavlovich [Korolev] whether it would be possible to schedule another launch to brighten the holiday, and Korolyov quickly seized on the remark.”