Kurt Caswell - Laika's Window

Animals for science and food will not be enough. There is no hope of joy—on Earth or on Mars—except in companionship, with other people and with other animals. Human evolution and development are inseparable from the evolution and development of animals, especially the dog. I think we will take our dogs to Mars when we go. For how could we live without them? Why would we want to? On our first journeys into space we followed the tracks of dogs, and when we go to Mars we will make those tracks with them. When the people of Earth gaze up at that small red point in the morning sky that is Mars, and the first Mars colonists stand with their dogs looking back at the beauty of the Earth, it will be with gratitude to Laika, who showed us all the way.

Abadzis, Nick. Laika . New York: First Second, 2007.

Andrews, James T., and Asif A. Siddiqi, editors. Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture . Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.

Asashima, Makoto, et al., editors. Fundamentals of Space Biology . Tokyo: Japan Scientific Societies Press, 1990.

Bergwin, Clyde R., and William T. Coleman. Animal Astronauts: They Opened the Way to the Stars . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963.

Berry, Wendell. “The Body and the Earth.” In The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays , 99. New York: Counterpoint, 2003.

Brzezinski, Matthew. Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries That Ignited the Space Race . New York: Times Books, 2007.

Burgess, Colin, and Chris Dubbs. Animals in Space: From Research Rockets to the Space Shuttle . Chichester: Praxis, 2007.

Chernov, V. N., and V. I. Yakovlev. “Research on the Flight of a Living Creature in an Artificial Earth Satellite.” ARS Journal Supplement 29, no. 10 (1959): 736–42.

Chertok, Boris. Rockets and People , edited by Asif Siddiqi. 4 vols. Washington, DC: NASA History Series, 2012.

Conn, P. Michael, and James V. Parker. The Animal Research War . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Conquest, Robert. Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps . New York: Viking, 1979.

Costlow, Jane, and Amy Nelson. Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History . Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.

D’Antonio, Michael. A Ball, a Dog, and a Monkey: 1957—The Space Race Begins . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Dickson, Paul. Sputnik: The Shock of the Century . New York: Walker, 2001.

Dyson, Freeman. “Mankind in the Universe.” Lecture at Salzburg, September 29, 1969. Physikalische Blätter 26 (1970): 7–14.

Gillispie, Charles Coulston. The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation, 1783–1784 . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Gugliotta, Guy. “Space: The Next Generation.” National Geographic Magazine . October 2007.

Harford, James. Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon . New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.

Helvajian, Henry, and Siegfried W. Janson. Small Satellites: Past, Present, and Future . El Segundo, CA: Aerospace Press, 2008.

Henderson, Caspar. The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Horowitz, Alexandra. Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know . New York: Scribner, 2009.

In the Shadow of the Moon . Directed by David Sington. Discovery Films, 2007.

Ivanov, Aleksei (Oleg Ivanovsky). Pervye Stupeni: Zapiski Inzhenera (The First Steps: An Engineer’s Notes) . Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya, 1970. Portions translated for Kurt Caswell by Natalia V. Maximova.

Jacchia, L. G. “The Descent of Satellite 1957 Beta One.” Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Special Report no. 15. July 1958.

Khrushchev, Sergei N. Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower . Translated by Shirley Benson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.

King-Hele, D. G., and Mrs. D. M. C. Walker. “The Last Minutes of Satellite 1957 Beta (Sputnik 2).” Nature , August 16, 1958, 426–27.

Kotovskaya, Adil Ravgatovna. “Why Were Flying Dogs Needed for Rockets and Satellites to Launch Yuri Gagarin?” Received via email from the author. Publisher unknown.

Kurnosova, L. V., editor. Artificial Earth Satellites . 2 vols. New York: Plenum Press, 1960.

Launius, Roger D., et al., editors. Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years since the Soviet Satellite . Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers, 2000.

Linenger, Jerry M. Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months aboard the Space Station Mir . New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

Malashenkov, Dimitri C. “Some Unknown Pages of the Living Organisms’ First Orbital Flight.” IAF Abstracts, Astrophysics Data System, 2002. 288.

Mayberry, Jim, editor. The New Mexico Museum of Space History Curation Paper No. 8 . 2012.

McPhee, John. The Curve of Binding Energy . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973.

Mondry, Henrietta. Political Animals: Representing Dogs in Modern Russian Culture . Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015.

Murakami, Haruki. Sputnik Sweetheart . Translated by Philip Gabriel. New York: Vintage International, 2001.

Oberg, James E. Red Star in Orbit . New York: Random House, 1981.

Parker, James V. Animal Minds, Animals Souls, Animal Rights . Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010.

Petranek, Stephen L. How We’ll Live on Mars . New York: TED Books, 2015.

Planel, Hubert. Space and Life: An Introduction to Space Biology and Medicine . Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2004.

Rhea, John, editor. Roads to Space: An Oral History of the Soviet Space Program . Translated by Peter Berlin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995.

Scranton, Roy. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of Civilization . San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015.

Shelton, William. Soviet Space Exploration: The First Decade . New York: Washington Square Press, 1968.

Siddiqi, Asif A. Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974 . Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2000.

———. “Iskusstvennyy sputnik zemli.” Spaceflight 49 (November 2007).

Soviet Writings on Earth Satellites and Space Travel . London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1959.

Space Dogs . Directed by Ivan Mazeppa. BBC Four, 2009.

Turkina, Olesya. Soviet Space Dogs . Translated by Inna Cannon and Lisa Wasserman. London: Fuel Design, 2014.

Verne, Jules. Around the Moon . Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2011.

———. From the Earth to the Moon . Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2011.

Wang, Xiaoming, and Richard H. Tedford. Dogs: Their Fossil Relatives and Evolutionary History . New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Witt, Peter N., et al. “Spider Web-Building in Outer Space: Evaluation of Records from the Skylab Spider Experiment.” Journal of Arachnology 4 (1977): 115–24.

Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff . New York: Bantam Books, 1979.

This book’s heart is rooted in the imagination of one of its editors at Trinity University Press, the poet Barbara Ras. I am deeply grateful for Barbara, for her life and her life’s work, for her belief in me as a writer, for calling me out of the void to take a ride on this star. She has made my life better, and I will remain in gratitude until the end.