Kurt Caswell - Laika's Window

In early 1961 the Soviet team settled on two dog flights as a final test of the Vostok spacecraft before they sent a human being into space. “The aim was to test the entire Vostok system,” said Yazdovsky in Roads to Space , “including the space suit, the ejection seat, and the life support facility.” On March 9 a dog named Chernuska (Blackie) made one orbit with a wooden mannequin the team called Ivan Ivanovich. Also on the flight were forty gray mice, forty white mice, forty black mice, guinea pigs, reptiles, human blood, cancer cells, plant seeds, various microbes, and fermentation agents. American and British scientists called the flight “a veritable Noah’s Ark,” Yazdovsky said, “carrying all the species represented on Darwin’s evolutionary scale.” Ivan Ivanovich wore the orange SK-1 pressure suit that the first cosmonaut would wear, and some of the biological experiments—mice, guinea pigs, microorganisms—were stowed in his chest cavity and abdomen, his hips and thighs. He rode in the ejection seat to test that system because the first cosmonaut was going to bail out and come down under a parachute. Ivan Ivanovich was like Pinocchio: not quite a man but not quite a mannequin either. The little black space dog, Chernuska, rode with the remaining biological experiments in the pressurized capsule. Most of the space dogs were white or mostly white, so Chernuska was a rarity by her coloring, along with Mishka (Little Bear), who was killed on her second flight in 1951, and Malyshka (Little One) who flew in 1955 and 1956 and was recovered both times.

Burgess and Dubbs tell the story of one of the members of the medical staff, Dr. Abram Genin, who, against regulations, strapped his old Pobeda wristwatch to Chernushka’s leg as he helped prep her for the flight. After graduating from the military academy, Genin received the watch as a gift and now wanted to get rid of it. He tried to break it with hard use—swimming with it in the sea, dropping it on the floor. The watch kept on ticking. As Chernushka was loaded into the capsule, he strapped it to her leg “hoping he’d never see it again,” he said in a 1989 interview with the Smithsonian. Did he think the rocket might explode or the dog would be lost in the Siberian wilderness? Did he have so little confidence in the rocket and the Vostok spacecraft? In Chernushka?

Ivan Ivanovich ejected from the spacecraft and Chernushka came down in the capsule, both landing in Siberia far to the east of Baikonur. Yazdovsky led the search and recovery team with a general named Nikolai Kamanin. It was snowing, and the wind stirred the snow, reducing visibility. According to Burgess and Dubbs, the team flew into a remote town, then traveled by truck as far as they could go, tracking Chernushka’s capsule. Somewhere along the route they acquired horses and rode in through hard country to the landing site near the town of Zainsk, Tatarstan. Locals had seen parachutes descending from the sky, then found a strange capsule on the ground, and farther off they could see what appeared to be a man in an orange flight suit lying unresponsive in a field. They wondered if he was a foreign spy and why he wasn’t moving. Maybe he was dead. The rescue team arrived, ignored the man in the field, and saved the dog, which emerged from the capsule wearing that watch. The team held her up for the fascinated crowd to see, the dog that had just flown in space.

Later the team tracked the watch back to Genin and returned it to him. “He was still wearing the watch at the time of the interview in 1989,” write Burgess and Dubbs, proving it was nearly indestructible.

Upon her death, Chernushka’s body was stuffed and put on display in the museum at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow. In 2011 the schoolchildren of Zainsk held a contest to design a memorial to Chernushka, whose story was legendary in the town. “The resulting monument features the trajectory of a spaceship looping around the Earth,” writes Turkina in Soviet Space Dogs , “with Chernushka’s head juxtaposed against it, proudly gazing skyward.”

Ivan Ivanovich made a second flight on March 25, 1961, this time with Zvezdochka (Little Star), a white ragamuffin of a dog, hardly a dog at all, with dark ears and a dark patch around her right eye. She was given her name by Gagarin, who was present at the launch and would soon be launched himself. This time the team wrote the word maket (dummy) on Ivan Ivanovich’s forehead. The pair rode into orbit and made one revolution of the Earth, and on the way back Ivan Ivanovich ejected while Zvezdochka rode down in the capsule. Both were recovered safely.

In spring 1961 the young Soviet air force officer, Yuri Gagarin, became the first man in space, making one orbit of the Earth in a Vostok spacecraft. Flying high above the planet, he crossed over the United States, over Africa, and over miles of blue ocean. From the window of his spacecraft, he gazed on the splendor of the Earth. “It’s beautiful,” he later said. “What beauty!” On his descent, when Vostok reached about 23,000 feet altitude, Gagarin ejected as planned and rode down under an orange parachute. Hanging in the sky, he could see the great Volga River of his native land, a field camp in the countryside, and some women tending a calf. He landed on his feet in a plowed field near the town of Engels, about 700 miles north and east of the Baikonur Cosmodrome where he had started his journey, where Laika before him had started hers. Dragging his chute behind him, he walked to the top of a hill and saw a woman and a young girl approaching. Gagarin was still a man, but too, he was something more: a cosmonaut, and the very first. When they noticed him, the woman slowed and hesitated. Frightened, the girl ran away. “I’m one of yours, a Soviet,” Gagarin yelled after them. “Don’t be afraid.” He walked up to the woman and explained that he had come from outer space, and he needed to find a telephone to call Moscow.

Gagarin is immensely important as the man who went first, but before him were the animals, the fruit flies and rabbits and cats, the fungi and fish and spiders, the chimpanzees, and the space dogs, with Laika as their ambassador. What is it one makes of these events? How are we to understand the many trials and accidents and sufferings of the animals flown into space, their sacrifices, the physical proof that they could withstand the rigors of a rocket launch, the reentry of a spacecraft, life in a confined capsule, the unknowns of microgravity, bombardment by high-energy cosmic particles. What does all this mean to us, for us, about us? What does it mean that we use animals for our own designs, our own purposes, to improve human life, for wealth and power? What does it mean that we sacrifice them instead of ourselves?

Animals advance us. Their fantastic achievements become our achievements. Our civilization, on which rests the advancement of our technologies, from agriculture to computers to space-faring, would not be possible without animals. But we do not own the animals of the Earth. They are not here for us alone. They are beings in their own right, and this is how we should think of them. We use animals to learn, and we learn from animals, but they belong to themselves. It is as if the storehouse of human knowledge was given to us by the animals, and sometimes at great expense to them. When animals die in service to us, I think it takes something from us, some piece of our humanity, even while it reminds us that we are human. How do we live inside this contradiction, that the animals we love best—chiefly, the dog—we also sacrifice to the monument of civilization, to the monument of ourselves? If we cannot come to any clearer purpose than a stated contradiction, at the very least when we turn again to the animals for help, and that help is given, let us not forget where it came from. It was the animals, it was the space dogs, who taught the cosmonauts to fly.