Kurt Caswell - Laika's Window

I think Laika’s death lasted much longer than two hours. I think she started dying the moment they put her in the capsule. After the first day inside the capsule, while still on the ground, she began to suffer from dehydration despite the team’s efforts, despite their love and care for her. By the time she entered orbit she had been inside the capsule for three days with only the water in her space dog food and the little water she received from Yazdovsky and Alexander Dmitrievich through the breathing hole. By the time the temperature began to rise inside her capsule in orbit, her suffering must have been at an end, for she would have mostly been gone already. For Laika to survive in space for seven days was an impossibility. She had no chance.

The story of Laika’s death, when and how she died, did not come to light until 2002. Dimitri Malashenkov, who had worked on the Sputnik II project, gave a paper entitled “Some Unknown Pages of the Living Organism’s First Orbital Flight” at the World Space Conference in Houston, Texas. With this paper, Malashenkov explained to the world for the first time that Laika had died not after seven days in orbit but after several hours. “After ground simulation of the flight conditions the conclusion has been made,” he writes, “that Layka should be lost from an overheating on 3–4 circuit of flight,” meaning between the third and fourth orbit. Written in what appears to be Malashenkov’s English, not in translation, he goes on to remark that “it was practically impossible to create a reliable system of a temperature control in such small term.”

When you travel to a place that is not your own, it is best to have a guide. You need help from a guide who knows where you are going, who has been there before, who can point out its dangers and pleasures and subtleties. On our journey into space, Laika was that guide for us. She was our scout, a star dog, a cyborg, a highly trained cosmonaut, the first cosmonaut, the first space traveler, an explorer in her own right. We followed her into Earth orbit and from there found our courage and journeyed to the moon. After the hollow years of World War II and on into the Cold War night terrors of global nuclear devastation, we all needed something to believe in, something to sustain our broken spirits. A trained soldier of the Cold War, a war dog, Laika emerged from that hostility to forge a new season of cooperation in space between the USSR, the US, and other nations, whose governments had so polarized the world, so cultivated a climate of fear, that we were living in the shadow of our mutual destruction. Had those rockets all been missiles, we would have no science in space, no space exploration; we would have only war. But a dog—even a war dog—doesn’t believe in war. A dog believes only in the task at hand. In space, Laika flew over all our troubles, all our pettiness, and opened a window on our world and on the cosmos, and through that window we could all see that the grand design was so much grander, more mysterious, more vast and empty and dark and filled with light than we had imagined. We came to understand that only in combining our resources—our science and technology, our political wills, our economies, our cultures and our art—could we explore that mystery. Laika was not a lab animal, not the subject of experimentation, not a victim of human ambition. She was an extension of the men and women who trained her, an extension of the Soviet Union, and an extension of us all. She was an extension of our desire for cosmic exploration, our desire to know, our desire to cast our voices into the dark and listen for what might be returned. She was the sacrificial being to an idea we had of ourselves—our better natures—the animal representation of what we all wish to be. And it is because of Laika that we can have this wish. She represents for us the threshold between the past and the future, between terrestrial life on Earth and a life unbounded among the stars. She is the line between gravity and microgravity, between confinement and freedom, between the known and the unknown, between Earth-faring and space-faring, between the terrestrial and the celestial. Laika crossed all these thresholds for us so that we could learn how to do it ourselves. She was, herself, a satellite, just as we are a satellite of her, following her off and away into the unknown dark.

In his lecture “Mankind in the Universe,” given before the German and Austrian Physical Societies in Salzburg in 1969, American theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson marked the beginning of the Space Age as June 5, 1927, when “nine men meeting in a restaurant in Breslau [now Wroclaw, Poland] founded Verein für Raumschiffahrt ” (VFR), the Association for Space Navigation. The VFR was a private upstart without government funding that for six years “carried through the basic engineering development of liquid-fueled rockets.” Hitler shut it down, but as Dyson sees it, the VFR stands as the “first romantic age in the history of spaceflight.”

Then in 1958, another grassroots organization, this time in the United States, formed around a theoretical physicist named Ted Taylor, who wanted to build a spacecraft powered by nuclear explosions. Dyson, one of the key members of the team, stated in his 1969 lecture that the organization had the spirit of the VFR in mind, and they began with three principles:

1. The conventional von Braun approach to space travel using chemical rockets would soon run into a dead end, since manned flights going farther than the moon would become absurdly expensive.

2. The key to interplanetary flight must be to use nuclear fuel, which carries in each kilogram a million times as much energy as chemical fuel.

3. A small group of people with daring and imagination could design a nuclear spaceship that would be both cheaper and enormously more capable than the best chemical rocket.

The group called itself Project Orion. “We felt from the beginning,” Dyson said, “that space travel must become cheap before it can have a liberating influence on human affairs.” In Project Orion, Dyson saw a better use of the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons: “We have for the first time imagined a way to use the huge stockpiles of our bombs for better purpose than for murdering people. My purpose, and my belief, is that the bombs which killed and maimed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki shall one day open the skies to man.”

Ted Taylor, whose story is the subject of John McPhee’s 1973 book The Curve of Binding Energy , called the H-bomb the worst invention ever but also the most interesting. He was attracted to extremes in physics, and nuclear explosions are about as extreme as it gets. Space exploration and science go side by side with the bomb and its delivery system, the missile, with one key difference: while highly competitive, space exploration and science also encourage cooperation among nations, as opposed to conflict, to achieve goals. Turner saw an opportunity to transform humankind’s most destructive power into one of its most constructive. Dyson agreed wholeheartedly, suggesting that Project Orion was “not only a scientific instrument but an imperative for the future of the world,” writes McPhee. While one danger of possessing the awesome power of nuclear weapons was using them against each other, Dyson also identified another danger fundamental to the human species. “He saw the human race running out of frontiers,” McPhee writes, “and he considered frontiers essential to the human psyche, for without them pressures would build that would implode upon the race and destroy it.” Space—that final frontier—Dyson was saying, might save us from ourselves.