Fifty years ago this month the Soviet Union rocked the world by sending the first living creature into space. On November 2, 1957, as the superpower "space race" raged, the USSR launched a large satellite into space with a little canine passenger, setting the precedent for future manned space travel.
The space pioneer was a stray dog called Laika who captured the hearts of people around the world as her mission aboard Sputnik-2 turned to tragedy. The mongrel, nicknamed Muttnik by the American press, died of overheating, stress and lack of oxygen within a few hours of taking off. One theory is that the dog may have been fed poison, since she was not destined to come back to Earth. In fact Laika was the only dog Russian scientists knowingly sent into space to die. Electrodes attached to the dog's body recorded her heartbeat, blood pressure and breathing rate. As the temperature and humidity inside the cabin rose during take-off, Laika's pulse increased threefold. All signs of life stopped within six hours of flight and people back home waited as Laika's life-support system ran down and the air in the capsule ran out.
Sputnik-2 orbited round the planet 2,570 times before it burnt in the Earth's atmosphere on April 14, 1958.
Three years after Laika's ill-fated journey, on July 28, 1960 two little mongrels, Bars and Lisichka, were prepared for flight aboard a Vostok prototype. Unfortunately the booster exploded 23 seconds into the launch and both dogs were killed.
There were some success stories however, like that of Belka and Strelka, the first dogs to successfully orbit the Earth in Sputnik 5. Sporting their colourful green and red spacesuits, the dogs were rocketed up on August 20, 1960 and made 18 tours around the Earth before landing successfully the next day. Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev gave one of Strelka's puppies to Caroline Kennedy, daughter of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Now the stuffed bodies of these space queens can be found at the Memorial Museum of Astronautics in Moscow.
After the deaths of two more dogs, Pchelka and Mushka, Zvezdochka (little star) was successfully sent into space three weeks before Yury Gagarin spent 108 minutes in orbit on April 12, 1961. He is said to have admitted: "I still can't say whether I am the first person or the last dog."
Although suborbital space flights had been undertaken before, Laika's journey in 1957 was the first time a living creature had actually entered a stable orbit in space. Stray dogs were favored as they were believed to be more robust than domestic dogs. Similarly, only female dogs ever travelled to space, not only because the female temperament was considered more suitable for travel, but because the special canine space suits were more easily adapted to collect body waste.
Dogs were trained by being kept for days at a time in progressively smaller cages. They were fed a special nutritious and highly fibrous protein jelly, to prevent the constipation usually caused by space travel.
Although Laika's journey helped to advance human knowledge on conditions in outer space and proved that a human being could survive being launched into orbit and endure weighlessness, there were misgivings about the sacrifice of animals for scientific purposes.
In 1998 Oleg Gazenko, one of the leading scientists behind the Soviet animals in space programs, expressed his regret at having allowed Laika to die the way she did: "Working with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I feel sorry about it. We shouldn't have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog."
By Nathalie Cooper
