Belka (Squirrel) weighed just twelve pounds and measured eighteen inches long and twelve inches tall. She was nearly all white but for her sides and short, stiff ears, which were tinted yellow. Belka’s broad, stout-looking head distinguished her from Strelka (Little Arrow), who was more gracile, leaner and longer, though she too weighed twelve pounds. Strelka’s head, back, and sides were marked by dark brown patches, and her ears look softer, more pliable, which gave her an amiable countenance. In some photographs, Strelka’s ears are laid back or bent down but not floppy like a yellow lab’s. In publicity photos and on TV, Belka typically wore a red flight suit while Strelka wore green. Belka had originally been called Albina (though she is not the same Albina who was Laika’s second for Sputnik II), and Strelka had been named Marquise. Turkina reports that it was the commander-in-chief of the Strategic Missile Force, Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, who thought the names too French, too bourgeois, and so directed the team to give the dogs strong Russian names.
With the success of their flight, the world fell in love with Belka and Strelka. Their images were widely published. They made radio and TV appearances and were trotted out for display before crowds of citizens and dignitaries. They were featured in newspaper and magazine stories, and their tale of heroism was retold in children’s books and more recently in animated films. Like Laika, their images were fashioned into porcelain figurines and appeared on stamps, ornamental wooden boxes, confectionery tins and chocolate boxes, badges, postcards, cartoons, you name it. Fan mail poured in. There was no pop culture in the Soviet Union in those days. “Under socialism the niche occupied by popular culture in capitalist society was subject to strict ideological control,” Turkina writes. “Paradoxically, Belka and Strelka became the first Soviet pop stars.”
In 1961 Van Cliburn came again to Moscow to perform, for he so loved the city and the nation. While he was recording a live performance at the Shabolovka broadcasting center, Belka and Strelka were featured TV guests in a nearby sound studio. Wily little things that they were, the two dogs escaped their handlers and scurried off through the hallways of the building. “We were at the Shabolovka studios where they were filming the dogs,” said Institute of Aviation Medicine biologist Ludmilla Radkevich in an interview in Space Dogs. “The cameraman said: ‘Could they bark a bit? Make them bark. Do something for the cameras.’ But the dogs just sat quietly until one of the cameramen dropped something. Then the dogs jumped up and ran right out of the studio.” The two dogs slipped through a doorway and found themselves on stage with Van Cliburn. The great pianist recognized the dogs immediately and interrupted his concert to welcome them. “He was so delighted and happy he couldn’t believe his luck,” said Radkevich.
Van Cliburn posed for photographs holding the dogs. In one photo, he holds the dogs close against his chest, Belka in his right hand, Strelka in his left, a happy smile on his face, the studio lights putting a shine on his always-perfect hair. In Soviet Space Dogs, Turkina states that the incident made the evening news, the American prodigy poised in awe and admiration of the Soviet space dog heroes. The moment is a giant among the many instances of what the Soviet PR machine called “Victories of Soviet Science for the Sake of the Entire Human Race.”
Belka, who had already flown three times, and Strelka, who had never flown, made their historic flight on August 19, 1960. The team prepped the two dogs, attaching sensors to monitor heart rate and respiration. Their orbital flight was scheduled to last twenty-four hours, so their space suits included a waste management system, and their capsule, a food dispenser. Sensors allowed the ground crew to monitor the air quality inside the capsule, its carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor levels, while TV cameras monitored the dogs in real time. Also along for the ride: rats, mice, insects, fungi, various plants and sprouts of wheat, peas, onions, and corn, and, according to some sources, a rabbit.
The team watched the video stream of the dogs in the capsule as the R-7 rocket lifted off. Belka and Strelka were pinned down by the g-force of acceleration. They looked almost dead, or dying, it was hard to tell. Their heart rate and respiration rose dramatically, even tripling, which let the team know the dogs were still alive but obviously in distress. And then the spacecraft entered orbit and that soft elevation of microgravity collapsed over them. Their vital signs normalized. They began to stir, to move inside the capsule a little, and then Belka started barking. The team on the ground could not hear her, as the microphones they installed were only able to detect the background noise inside the spacecraft, but they could see her. She struggled and barked in that weird absence of gravity, nothing like the environment her body had evolved in. So she barked. A dog barking in space. The spacecraft came around the Earth for the fourth time, and Belka vomited. That done, she settled down and seemed to accept what was happening to her. As her body adjusted to microgravity, she went along with the ride. There was nothing else she could do.
It’s likely that Belka’s distress and vomiting were caused by what researchers now call space adaptation syndrome, the effect of moving rapidly from the hypergravity environment of launch to the microgravity environment of space. This shift causes an increase in cranial pressure, which can lead to headache, vertigo, a general feeling of malaise, and vomiting. The condition affects about 50 percent of all astronauts who fly in space. Yazdovsky and his team were observing these effects for the first time and acknowledged that there were just too many unknowns about microgravity. They recommended the first human in orbit make no more than one trip around. The recommendation held, and this is precisely what Gagarin did.
After eighteen orbits in a period of some twenty-five hours, the spacecraft carrying Belka and Strelka made its reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. The capsule the dogs rode in was ejected from the spacecraft and came down under a braking chute. It landed off course in the steppe near the Russian city of Orsk at the southern tip of the Ural Mountains, that great sweep of temperate grassland where, some six thousand years ago, the horse was first domesticated, revolutionizing the way we live and work, hunt and fight. The recovery team found the capsule and opened it. Inside were Belka and Strelka in perfect condition. Once released from their restraining harnesses, the two dogs ran about the search and recovery team barking and leaping into the air.
Belka and Strelka were interviewed on Radio Moscow and put on display at a press conference at the Academy of Sciences. In a now-famous photograph, Gazenko holds the two dogs aloft, one in each hand, the look of triumph in his smile and eyes, a lighted candelabra in the foreground. There was no doubt, in that moment, that Belka and Strelka’s success would not have been possible without Laika’s death.
In November of that year, Strelka gave birth to a litter of six puppies sired by Pushok, a space dog who never flew. Khrushchev gave one of the pups, Pushinka (Fluffy), as a gift to America’s first family, the Kennedys. Pushinka was a gift of political and cultural goodwill, but also a kind of gloat: see what the Soviet Union has achieved! Before joining the Kennedy family in the White House, Pushinka endured a thorough inspection, which included X-rays, to make certain she was not bugged or surgically implanted with some explosive device. Little Pushinka, the Russian debutante, later fell in love with one of the Kennedys’ dogs, Charlie. They had a litter of pups, American-Soviet mutts the Kennedys named Butterfly, Streaker, White-tips, and Blackie. President Kennedy called them pupniks.