In an interview with Sergei Khrushchev, I asked about Korolev, a man he had met socially through his father. “Korolev was a tank,” Khrushchev told me. “A brilliant manager, not really a scientist, but he was the person who could push everything through. And he could organize everything around him and keep control, like a general. He was not a general like Eisenhower, maybe more like MacArthur. Or maybe better to say General Patton. He was a very good man. It would have been very difficult to bring these projects to success without his ability to organize all these people.”
In 1949 Korolev selected a young physician named Vladimir Yazdovsky (1913–1999) to lead a team in biomedical research to prepare the way for sending a human being into space. Yazdovsky was charged not only with designing and building life-support systems for space travel but also with developing a selection and training program for small animals that would test those systems. After working as a physician for the army during World War II, Yazdovsky had hoped to retire from the military, but when his request was denied he continued his service with the air force, working on aviation medicine. When Korolev approached Yazdovsky with an offer to work on a new project, he was initially uninterested. “I informed [Korolev] that… I was already committed to other work in aviation medicine,” Yazdovsky said in Roads to Space. Korolev, naturally, pushed back. “What I am offering you is far more challenging,” he said. Then he asked, “Have you ever watched a rocket being launched?” Yazdovsky responded that he had not. “Well, then,” Korolev said, “if you’ve seen it once, it will stay with you for the rest of your life.”
As a guest of Lockheed Martin and United Launch Alliance, I watched an ISS resupply mission launch on an Atlas V rocket out of Cape Canaveral in spring 2016. The day before the launch, I joined a party of other guests—mostly family and friends of the teams that built the rocket—to watch the rocket rollout to the pad. It moved slowly along a track, like the Empire State Building on wheels. The next evening, after hors d’oeuvres, we assembled on the roof of a building some four miles from the launchpad, which was the closest we could get without being part of the team launching the rocket, a United Launch Alliance representative told me. A few clouds drifted in moonlight over the Atlantic, but it was otherwise a clear and starry night. I stood near a couple of people I had met there, the man who directed the team that designed and built the rocket’s wiring harness, and an executive with a top NASA contractor. People drew in their breath when the engines fired, and the rocket came up into the space above the pad and seemed to hover there. When the rocket rose against the night sky, the bright flare from the engines roared, and then it crackled, like violently crumpling brown paper. That sound filled everything that could hold a sound and then spilled over. I could feel it in my feet and in my chest. I felt something of myself going up with that rocket too, that in my brief time in its company I had become somehow invested. It moved out and away, and I watched as the sky closed beneath it. “God,” I heard someone say. “I bet that thing gets terrible gas mileage.”
I’m pretty sure seeing that rocket launch will stay with me for the rest of my life, as Korolev had said, but that claim still wasn’t enough to convince Yazdovsky. He remained committed to his current obligations, so Korolev took a number of evening walks with him in Moscow’s Petrovsko-Razumovskiy Park to talk him through the details. “He explained everything to me,” Yazdovsky said. “Then he took me to his design bureau, showed me around at the plant where rockets were being manufactured, and introduced me to his colleagues.” Korolev believed in pushing hard at the limits of things; pushing hard was how he lived his life. He told Yazdovsky that life wasn’t really life without risk, and that there was nothing more beautiful in the world than watching a rocket ascend into the sky. Korolev’s patient insistence paid off when Yazdovsky finally accepted the position. As a first step, Korolev directed Yazdovsky to speak with the man who was currently working on the project and could catch him up on what had been done so far. “I did as I had been told,” Yazdovsky said, “but found nothing except for a sheet of paper with an elaborate sketch of a dog drawn on it. I told Korolev that we would have to start from scratch.”
Careful, meticulous, and unswerving, Yazdovsky went to work developing a space dog training program. By the close of his long career, he had racked up an impressive list of honors and awards, among them the unofficial titles of “pioneer” and “founder” of Soviet space medicine and biology. It was Yazdovsky who selected and prepared the space dogs to fly, and it was Yazdovsky who carried the burden of responsibility when those dogs did not make it back.
The decision to work with dogs in the Soviet space program, as opposed to some other small animal (monkeys, rats, or even cats), grew out of Russia’s history of working with dogs in scientific research, made famous by physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) and his work in respondent conditioning. Biological rockets in the United States were carrying monkeys, and monkeys proved difficult to train and vulnerable to the stresses of spaceflight. They just weren’t very tough. Yazdovsky knew this because he had read books in translation written by Americans working on these flights. The books “proved very helpful,” Yazdovsky said, “since I could well appreciate what the Americans had been up against.” The Soviets knew dogs, and they knew how to work with them. Dogs are easy to train; akin to humans in their physiology and their emotional and physical reactions to stimuli; easy to care for; and easy and inexpensive to acquire. In order to put a man into space, Yazdovsky’s team would have to first study animals subjected to the conditions of spaceflight, and they were going to do it with dogs.
Yazdovsky went to work identifying the major challenges of spaceflight. It would be a tedious process, taking small steps only, inching ever forward. With each problem solved, new problems were uncovered. This is the way of science, the way of new technologies. “The machine,” writes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Wind, Sand, and Stars, “does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.” If the Soviets were to put a man into space and do it safely, Yazdovsky determined, they would need to address three major challenges:
1. the conditions of near-Earth orbit, which includes the absence of oxygen, meteorites that might damage a spacecraft and its crew, cosmic and solar radiation, and extreme temperatures both hot and cold
2. spaceflight itself, which includes acceleration and the resulting g-forces, vibration, weightlessness, and noise
3. confinement in a small spacecraft, which includes isolation; bodily functions, especially eating, drinking, and elimination of waste; and psychological stresses
Soviet rockets in the early stages of development could not carry the heavy payloads of today, so space dogs had to be small, between thirteen and sixteen pounds. They had to be relatively young, between eighteen months and six years. And they had to be white, mostly white, or another suitably light color. A black-and-white video camera was installed in many of the spacecraft to gather visual data during flight, and white dogs were much easier to see in this footage. Finally, the dogs had to be female. A primary reason for this was waste collection. Flight suits were fitted with a waste collection system that functioned best when both solid and liquid waste exited the dog from the same basic location of the body. There was no equipment or room in a flight capsule allowing a male dog to lift his leg. Even so, a number of the sources I read refer to some of the space dogs as “him” or “he,” and some were given names more suitable for male dogs. A Russian friend and translator explained to me that in Russian one would always refer to a dog with a male name as “he,” regardless of its sex. So those dogs were female with male names, or some were in fact male. Indeed, a few sources report that a few male dogs did fly but only on suborbital flights. Other sources avoid using pronouns for the dogs altogether, preferring their names, possibly to avoid inaccuracies regarding sex.