Kurt Caswell - Laika's Window

One of the problems the team struggled to solve was carrying enough battery power for the duration of Laika’s mission, which was planned for seven days in orbit. Today’s network of satellites and ground stations makes it possible to transmit and receive information nearly anywhere on Earth. In 1957, however, Sputnik II had to fly over a ground station that could receive its signal for only about fifteen minutes, after which it passed out of range. Why keep putting the signal out if there was no Soviet station below to receive it, the team asked? To save critical battery power, they installed an automatic switch that turned the telemetry system on only when the satellite was passing over such a ground station.

Simply put, a rocket is a payload sitting on top of a fuel tank with an engine. The majority of its weight comes from its fuel, not its payload, but the payload has to be within range of what the rocket can lift into space beyond its own weight. Until Sputnik II , nothing over 180 pounds had ever been lifted into orbit, and that was Sputnik I . Of primary importance then was keeping Sputnik II light, slimming it down wherever and however possible. The team decided it would keep the final stage rocket booster attached to the satellite, allowing the elimination of the pyrotechnics and hardware required to separate the booster. Some sources report that the booster failed to separate in space, but this is not true. Another reason to keep the booster attached to the satellite was to use its telemetry system to send the data collected from Laika’s sensors to Earth. The telemetry system on the satellite itself was maxed out transmitting two different signals to Earth: a steady tone at 40MHZ and a pulsing tone at 20MHZ that was identical to that of Sputnik I . There was no more room in the satellite for a second telemetry system for Laika’s data, so the team had to use the system in the booster. Finally, the team had learned from Sputnik I that the booster was much brighter in orbit than the satellite and so possible to see from the ground. They would leave the booster attached to Sputnik II because, as a November 13, 1957, article in Pravda reports, it “appreciably simplified the task of ascertaining the sputnik’s bearings by means of optical observation.”

What was unclear, however, was how the attached booster would affect the temperature inside Laika’s capsule. The team knew the sun would heat Laika’s capsule from the outside, and the instruments and batteries, as well as Laika herself, would heat it from the inside. To cool Laika’s capsule, the team relied on a forced-air cooling system, insulation, and the satellite’s metal exterior, which would help reflect heat back into space. But the system could not be tested properly on the ground. The only way to know if the system worked was to launch the satellite, with Laika inside, into orbit.

Sometime before the revolution of agriculture, about 15,000 years before the present, or according to some scholars, even deeper into our ancestral past, 30,000 years, maybe even 100,000 years, the wolf and the human animal came together. Some say it happened first with the Asiatic wolf in present-day China. Others assert it happened among the Natufians of the Upper Jordan Valley in present-day Israel. Or perhaps it happened in several places and times when the human world was inseparable from the world of animals. Wherever and whenever it happened, the wolf and the human animal came together, and we have not been separate since.

The process of domestication is a human enterprise, something human beings do to make use of animals for work and food. “The dog is an animal domesticated,” writes Alexandra Horowitz in Inside of a Dog , “a word that grew from a root form meaning ‘belonging to the house.’ Dogs are animals who belong around houses,” and it was humans who brought them around and brought them in. But domestication is something animals have done to themselves too. We made dogs central to our lives, just as dogs made us central to theirs. “The dog is a member of a human social group,” writes Horowitz, “its natural environment, among people and other dogs.” This has been, as many scholars have noted, a positive arrangement for dogs, which have proliferated in every climate and on every continent, while wolf populations are declining worldwide.

You can imagine the conditions under which the dog came into the house, a world in which a few less aggressive wolves drew close to human camps and picked up scrap meat and bones. Their pups were likewise conditioned to tolerate the presence of humans, and little by little wolves moved into the camps as the people allowed. Tolerant wolves like these living in and around camps with humans would have defended their food source from more aggressive wolves and other animals. At some point humans must have come to understand that these wolves were helpful and, then later, essential to daily life. Over time these wolves became dogs.

Work in exchange for food, maybe shelter too, is the original arrangement between humans and wolves, and when wolves became dogs this agreement remained intact. Over the past 15,000 years, dogs have also been food for humans about as often as they have been fed by us. Only the wealthy and noble classes had the kind of resources to keep dogs as pets, that is, until recently with the rise of a global middle class. Most people throughout human history could afford to keep a dog only for food or work. In making our living, we have used dogs as draught animals, capable of pulling a small cart, sled, or travois; for herding; for guarding property and people; for service in war and police operations; for hunting; for search and rescue; and more recently for therapy and service to people with disabilities. Dogs have performed so many wondrous tasks. In the Middle Ages and for a time after, a breed of short-legged dog was trained to run on a wheel like a hamster. The energy produced by the wheel could be harnessed to turn meat on a spit or churn butter. Such dogs were known as turnspit dogs and were the cornerstone of the modern medieval kitchen.

In preparation for what she would experience inside Sputnik II , Laika learned to endure confinement for long periods of time. She did not achieve this all at once but rather in a series of small steps. Wearing a restraining suit with attachment rings, she was put into a small capsule and metal restraining chains attached to the rings on her suit. She endured confinement this way for an hour before her trainers released her. The next training session she might spend two hours in the box. Then four. And so on. According to Burgess and Dubbs, the dogs “typically protested with barks and whining when placed in this restrictive space for periods of two to three days.” Laika worked through this discomfort and settled down, which encouraged the team to advance her in the training. Eventually she was able to tolerate confinement in these capsules for up to twenty days. Like the capsule in which she would fly into space, these training capsules habituated Laika to a low-light environment. The only light inside came in through the window.

Inside her capsule, it would be impossible for Laika to get into a squatting position. She would have to do her best in those cramped quarters to eliminate into a waste catchment bag attached to her pelvis and secured by a shoulder harness. “By means of a rubber tube in the receptacle, the animal’s excretions were drained into an airtight ‘latrine’ reservoir,” write Chernov and Yakovlev in their 1959 report “Research on the Flight of a Living Creature in an Artificial Earth Satellite.” “For the purpose of deodorization and the absorption of liquid fractions, the reservoir contained a certain amount of activated carbon and specially dried moss.” This system was unnecessary for brief, suborbital flights but essential for longer duration flights. In training, most space dogs were reluctant to use the waste system. They just didn’t bother to go, and even laxatives were little good in encouraging them. But slowly over time, some of the dogs learned to use the system, and one of those dogs was Laika. In some photos of Laika, you can see the catchment bag attached to her pelvis, hanging down beneath her.