Kurt Caswell - Laika's Window

Sputnik I left the US scrambling to put up its first satellite, Explorer I , which would not be achieved for nearly three more months. Explorer I was a much smaller satellite, weighing just over thirty pounds, while Sputnik I weighed in at 184 pounds. Sputnik II topped out at over 1,100 pounds. For comparison, the GOES-R weather satellite that I saw under construction in a clean room during my visit to Lockheed Martin’s Denver campus weighs 11,500 pounds. It launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in 2016. In the early days of the Space Race, however, the US did not have a rocket with the kind of power necessary to lift an object as heavy as Sputnik II into orbit, and Khrushchev knew it. Vanguard I , the US’s second satellite, went up on March 17, 1958, and it was even smaller than Explorer I . While it bears the distinction of being the first satellite powered by solar energy, it weighed a mere 3.2 pounds. Khrushchev taunted the US, calling Vanguard I a grapefruit. Even so, while the first two sputniks came down within a couple of months, Vanguard I is still up there, and it will likely remain in orbit for another couple hundred years.

Some historians have written that President Eisenhower was much less concerned with being first into space than he was in establishing space as open and free to all nations. Such an international agreement, Eisenhower knew, would allow nations to fly satellites over other nations, which would be very useful in spying. Along with other senior officials, Eisenhower had the advantage of reports from a new high-altitude spy plane, the U-2, which revealed that the Soviets were really not technologically or militarily ahead of the US. There was really no good reason to panic; still, his plan was a calculated risk. If the US was first into space and its satellite flew over the USSR, he reasoned, the Soviets might claim the satellite had violated their sovereignty and would then urge a referendum to partition not only the skies over nations, but outer space too. However, if the Soviets were first to fly their satellite over the United States, and the US did not protest, they would then have set a precedent enabling the US to fly satellites over the Soviet Union. What Eisenhower could not have predicted was the reaction of the American people to being beaten into space by the Soviets. In the US, the initial excitement surrounding the technological achievement of Sputnik I was supplanted by fear and anger, which was bad for the American psyche, bad for American security, and bad for Eisenhower’s presidency.

The US had, in fact, two leading rocket programs in operation at the time: the navy’s Project Vanguard (which Gil Moore worked on) and the army’s Redstone missile program, directed by the German engineer Werner von Braun. Eisenhower suspected that putting a satellite into orbit on a military-purposed Redstone missile would incite fear in the Soviet Union, so he endorsed Vanguard’s science mission and told von Braun and his team to stand down. But Vanguard struggled. Attempt after attempt ended in failure. Von Braun’s team launched a rocket weeks in advance of Sputnik I that could have entered orbit, but they pulled it back to comply with the president’s directive. Then Sputnik I went up. “For God’s sake, turn us loose,” von Braun said. Eisenhower finally did, and Explorer I launched into orbit on January 31, 1958, on von Braun’s Redstone rocket, which put the US back on track in what became known as the Space Race.

Before the successful launch of Explorer I , though, Khrushchev planned to stun the world again with Soviet power and ingenuity. He ordered the launch of a second satellite, Sputnik II , to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The satellite was also a science laboratory, as Laika, along with Sputnik II ’s instruments, would return data to the USSR essential to understanding the conditions in Earth orbit, data crucial to finding out if and how a human being could survive in space. The Soviet news agency TASS issued this statement in a press release: “Artificial earth satellites will pave the way to interplanetary travel, and apparently our contemporaries will witness how the freed and conscientious labor of the people of the new socialist society makes the most daring dreams of mankind a reality.”

During her flight and for decades after, Laika was one of the most famous dogs in the world. She appears on most every list of famous dogs, along with Lassie, Hachiko, and Rin Tin Tin; and she is listed among Time magazine’s fifteen “most influential animals that ever lived,” joining the company of Alexander the Great’s war horse, Bucephalus; Dian Fossey’s favored mountain gorilla, Digit; and the world’s first successfully cloned adult mammal, Dolly the sheep. The Soviet Union issued a postage stamp in Laika’s honor, and so did Albania, Benin, North Korea, the Emirate of Sharjah (part of the United Arab Emirates), East Germany (now the reunited nation of Germany), Guyana, Hungary, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Poland, and Romania. Laika-brand cigarettes were hugely popular in the Soviet Union and in other countries. Her image was featured on cigarette cases, cigar bands, matchboxes, postcards, posters, in newspaper and magazine drawings and cartoons, on boxes of chocolates and chocolate wrapping papers, lapel pins and badges, handkerchiefs, confectionery tins, playing cards, commemorative plates, desktop sculptures, and porcelain figurines. In Japan, Laika’s image was featured on a child’s tin watering can, a spinning top, and a bucket. In the US she was featured on a child’s piggy bank, or “Sputnik Bank,” and on a child’s toy plastic helmet with two metal spring antennas, the “Wee Beep Sputnik” helmet. In West Germany a child’s mechanical toy featured Laika in a sputnik orbiting the Earth. And in Mexico, a tin serving tray pictured Betty Boop walking Laika on a leash across the surface of an alien world, possibly the moon. Laika has been the subject of poems, children’s books, at least one graphic novel, a few books of nonfiction, songs, and music videos. Years later, circulating on the internet, is the curious theory that Scooby-Doo is an escaped Soviet space dog, perhaps in Laika’s image, and you can see such a space dog running across the screen in the 2014 Marvel Studios movie Guardians of the Galaxy as part of the cosmic collection of a character called The Collector.

Laika is the only nonhuman represented on the Monument to the Conquerors of Space at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow. Positioned on the roof of the museum, the monument is a 350-foot-high titanium sculpture of a rocket leading a plume of exhaust and smoke from its engines. The monument is wrapped in a bas-relief of the heroes of the Soviet space program. I stood before the monument in the summer of 2016 and walked around its base. It was a particularly cool day, and it had only just stopped raining. Through my reading I had come to know the names and faces of a number of the greatest figures in the early Soviet space program, but none of them was recognizable here. These were representations of a generalized Soviet hero, generalized faces in various generalized poses and actions. Laika, however, was recognizable, sitting in the capsule that took her to the stars. She is positioned over the shoulders of a man who is kneeling and looking at a set of drawings or plans, and beneath the raised arm of another man who, along with the rocket behind him, points the way to the stars. That monument—on which Laika is a central figure—writes Olesya Turkina in Soviet Space Dogs , “came to symbolise the hopes and dreams of an entire generation of Soviet people.”