Kurt Caswell - Laika's Window

In 1958 the British Overseas Airways Corporation (now defunct) established the first transatlantic jet service, flying between New York and London. Such flights are routine in the twenty-first century, so much so that we call this astonishing feat of engineering and science “crossing the pond.” The trip that took Columbus and his three ships over two months to achieve was now possible in about eight hours, and available to almost any middle-class citizen of any country in the world. And we have gone faster still. Astronauts on a space shuttle flight out of Cape Canaveral, Florida, easily crossed the Atlantic in about nine minutes. Also in 1958, the European Economic Community was established, the precursor of the European Union. The New York Yankees defeated the Milwaukee Braves to win the World Series. Elvis was inducted into the US Army. And in the US, a stamp cost three cents, and a gallon of gas cost a quarter.

In 1958 Dwight Eisenhower was president of the United States, and Nikita Khrushchev was named the new Soviet premier. This was the year Russian novelist Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in Literature but declined to accept the medal at the ceremony in Sweden under pressure from his nation’s government. The Soviet Union had banned publication of Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago two years earlier. Meanwhile the CIA was running a propaganda campaign and played a central role in the novel’s publication in Russian (it was first published in Italian translation) to push its perceived anti-Soviet threads into the ring of global politics. This was also the year American pianist Van Cliburn won the first Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition, held in Moscow. His final performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3 brought the primarily Soviet audience to its feet, and they stood applauding for eight minutes. The competition was intended to bring Soviet cultural superiority to the world’s stage, but instead that spotlight was stolen by an American, a Texan no less, whom Time later touted on its May 19, 1958, cover as “The Texan Who Conquered Russia.” In this now famous story, the judges were compelled to ask Premier Khrushchev for permission to award first prize to an American. “Is he the best?” Khrushchev is said to have asked. The judges consented that he was. “Then give him the prize,” Khrushchev said.

The prize was given, and in fact it was given on the same ordinary Monday that Sputnik II came down. Clearly there was a lot going on that night, and clearly there was a lot going on in 1958. But Sputnik II , together with Sputnik I , towers above most everything else during that year, or during that decade, and arguably during the several decades before or after. That satellite with the little dog inside—its launch, its orbit, and its burning in the atmosphere—is one of the events that has redefined Homo sapiens as a species. That event signals a singular moment of self-determination when we first left our planet home to venture into the cosmos, crossing into what Aldous Huxley, and Shakespeare before him, called a “brave new world.” Sputnik I and II are the first steps in becoming an interplanetary species, in becoming Earth independent. In his book Soviet Space Exploration , William Shelton writes of Russian novelist Vladimir Orlov’s determination that artificial satellites and spacecraft are artificial planets because they are populated by all manner of creatures from Earth, including humans. From the time of the first two Sputniks , humans have maintained a continuous presence in space, living and working in low-Earth orbit on various space stations, walking on the moon, and operating robotic rovers, telescopes, satellites, and probes as far out as Pluto, and even beyond. From these artificial planets, then, we will continue on and colonize a natural planet, probably Mars. Indeed, private corporations and space agencies in a number of countries have their sights set on a crewed mission to Mars. And it may happen sooner than you think. “There was a time,” writes Orlov, “when terrestrial life stepped over the threshold of the ocean and conquered the land; now it has stepped off the Earth to conquer the abyss of the cosmos.”

What the Soviets did first, and what other nations would do after, resides at the zenith of our curiosity, because to be human is to be curious, to be an explorer. We cannot help but look outward to the next horizon, to the far-off and beyond, to the distant and the fantastic. We cannot help but dream. It is what we are, and what we do, and it tumbles from the beginnings of our biological evolution. In his essay “The First Earth Satellite,” Sergei Khrushchev (son of then-Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and a rocket engineer in his own right) calls this drive to explore “the naïve confidence that [we] are equal to anything.” Human beings embarked upon space exploration, Khrushchev writes, to prove to ourselves “that [we] can touch the stars with [our] hand, that the Moon is only a stopping station, the first step, and that the next step is Mars, and after this anywhere. For me,” he writes, the time of Sputnik “was the best and the brightest time of my life.” The Space Race, during those early years, and even now, writes Khrushchev, “was a race not to the death, but to immortality.”

Until Laika’s flight, scientists did not know what would happen to a living organism outside the protection of Earth’s atmosphere where there is no oxygen to breathe, weakened gravity, and increased radiation. What would be the effects of solar radiation (from our sun) and cosmic radiation (from outside our solar system) on a living organism in orbit? The Van Allen belts had yet to be discovered, and their role, along with Earth’s magnetic field, in shielding the Earth and its atmosphere from radiation was not known. How long, scientists wanted to know, could a living organism survive in orbit? Five minutes? Three days? One year? No one knew. And what would be the effects of microgravity, or weightlessness, on a living organism? Could the body’s organ systems function in microgravity? Or would the whole thing just shut down? No one knew. Oleg Gazenko, a physician who helped select and train Laika, notes in an interview for the BBC documentary Space Dogs that “it was absolutely essential to have an answer to the question, was weightlessness really an insurmountable barrier to the chances of a human surviving any length of time in the conditions of space travel?” And even if a human being could manage increased radiation and decreased gravity, could he survive the flight into space, the g-force of an accelerating rocket, and the violent vibration of that wild ride? No one knew. So before sending a human being into orbit, we sent Laika, a little white dog from the streets of Moscow, who would test these unknowns for us. “Quite simply,” writes Olesya Turkina in her book Soviet Space Dogs , “without the first dog in space there would be no human spaceflight.”

Laika rode into orbit on November 3, 1957. The USSR reported that she survived for about a week, returned a stream of valuable data that would help make human spaceflight possible, and then died a painless death as her oxygen ran out. Soviet chief designer Sergei Korolev announced in a statement that “the data gathered on cosmic rays during the flight of Sputnik II [was] of great value” and that “the study of biological phenomena made during the spaceflight of a living organism—something done for the first time in Sputnik II —[was] of tremendous interest…. The time will come when a spacecraft carrying human beings will leave earth and set out on a voyage to distant planets—to remote worlds. The way to the stars is open.”