With the flight of Belka and Strelka, the space dog program was coming to a close. The Soviets knew it would not be long before they sent a man into space, and then the kind of work the dogs were doing to test life support and recovery systems would not be needed anymore. This was not, of course, the end of biological and medical research in space using animals. Such research is ongoing, but cosmonauts would soon become both scientist and test subject. Another factor pushing the end of the space dog program was a growing criticism by both animal rights organizations and the general public. People just didn’t want to hear news of flying dogs, and especially news of those dogs dying. Fruit flies? Mice? Fungi? No problem. But dogs, the animal we love best, our companions and friends? Too cruel. Not ethical. Inhuman.
Mukha (Little Fly) and Pchelka (Little Bee), along with guinea pigs, rats, mice, fruit flies, and some plants, lifted off on December 1, 1960, aboard Sputnik IV for a flight that was to last one day in orbit. Mukha had already had two near misses on her life: she had been passed over for Laika’s doomed mission, and she nearly died during her three-day test of Laika’s capsule. Now she was going to risk it all again. During the flight, TV cameras onboard the spacecraft broadcast a signal back to Mission Control at eighty-three megacycles. The CIA demodulated the signal and watched footage of the two dogs during their flight. It was becoming harder and harder for both the US and the USSR to keep their programs, and their technology, secret from each other. When the spacecraft reentered Earth’s atmosphere, the retro-rocket, designed to slow and guide its trajectory, malfunctioned. It fired and kept firing, and it would not shut down, sending the spacecraft far off course. Mission Control was no longer in control, and it looked like Mukha and Pchelka would land outside the Soviet Union. To avoid a foreign government getting ahold of their spacecraft and their dogs, Mission Control destroyed it with a remote self-destruct feature, sending a fiery trail across the sky. Both dogs were killed.
December 22, 1960. The pilot of an Anton-2 aircraft sent a radio message to Arvid Pallo, head of the space dog search and recovery team: “I can see a sphere with two openings. There is also a parachute,” he said.
Pallo and a colleague boarded a helicopter and flew to the crash site, about sixty kilometers west of a town called Tura, in far Siberia. It was late in the day, and at this latitude in winter, daylight lasted only six hours. Pallo opted to risk getting caught in the dark and cold because if he couldn’t find the spacecraft and disarm its self-destruct system, it was going to blow up, taking the two dogs—Shutka (Joke) and Kometa (Comet)—with it. When the helicopter landed, Pallo and his colleague jumped out, sinking into waist-deep snow. Unsure which direction to go, they soon lost their way. The big Anton-2 cruised by again, the pilot warning that everyone needed to get back to the base. It was getting dark, and the temperature was dropping. The helicopter pilot would have trouble navigating in this unfamiliar landscape at night.
“I used my radio to [ask]… the An-2 pilot to show us the way by flying along a straight line from the helicopter to the spacecraft,” Pallo said in an interview for Roads to Space. The pilot did so, and Pallo and his colleague set off in that direction. Arriving at the downed spacecraft, dark and cold coming in against them, Pallo and his colleague had to work fast.
The launch of Shutka and Kometa had gone well, but at the edge of space the third stage of the rocket malfunctioned and failed to push the spacecraft into orbit. Emergency systems kicked in, and the spacecraft separated from the rocket at 133 miles altitude. The team assumed the spacecraft and the two dogs, along with some mice, insects, and plants, would be destroyed when the self-destruct system detected its anomalous trajectory, but it didn’t. On the descent, the capsule carrying the two dogs should have been jettisoned from the main spacecraft and come down under its own braking chute. That didn’t happen either. On the way down, the dogs hit 20g, a crushing force that could kill them, and landed near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, where in 1908 an asteroid or a comet struck the Earth, destroying two thousand square kilometers of taiga forest. The so-called Tunguska Event remains the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history and has been the subject of many UFO conspiracies.
If the dogs had survived the descent and landing, they were not yet safe. The self-destruct system that failed to detonate during flight had a backup timer: the spacecraft would blow up in sixty hours unless the system was disarmed. There it sat in the snow and ice of the Siberian winter, the dogs inside, the timer ticking.
In Roads to Space, Pallo said he volunteered to approach the spacecraft first and try to disarm it. “Go and stand behind a tree while I go up to the spacecraft and disable the self-destruct system,” Pallo told his colleague.
The man refused. “This is my system,” he said.
“I’ll go,” Pallo said, “because I’m the leader of the group.”
Again the man refused.
The timer ticking, the two men used matches to draw lots. Pallo lost.
There in the taiga forest, darkness coming on, the temperature at –40 degrees Celsius, Pallo watched from behind the protection of a tree as his colleague approached the spacecraft. The man set to work disarming the self-destruct system, calling out each of the steps to Pallo. The work came along easily, efficiently, and then it was done. But as the dogs’ capsule had not ejected from the spacecraft, that system was still armed, as were some of the pyrotechnics from the parachute deployment system. Either could explode and kill the dogs as well as the two men. This time Pallo would do the work while his colleague stood behind a tree. Pallo reached inside the rocket’s interior to disarm the system, but his heavy winter gear made it impossible for him to get his arm far enough inside. He removed his coat. As he strained to reach the connector, the spacecraft shifted. “It was anyone’s guess what might happen next,” Pallo said.
What happened next was that Pallo reached the connector and pulled it free. Now to free the dogs.
“We tried to see the dogs through the portholes,” Pallo said, “but the glass was covered with hoarfrost which had built up during the days and nights since the spacecraft was first spotted. We knocked on the walls of the container but heard no signs of life inside.” Night was coming on. The helicopter sat waiting, its rotors still turning, burning fuel to keep the engine warm, the pilot beckoning to the men. Come on. We do not have much time. We must leave now. Pallo and his colleague left the dogs, Shutka and Kometa, inside the sealed capsule and returned to Tura. If they were alive at all, they would have to endure another long cold night.
Arriving back at Tura, Korolev called Pallo on his radio frequency phone twice, asking for an update on the condition of the dogs and the spacecraft. “As I began to describe our ordeal,” Pallo said, “the aurora borealis appeared and cut off our radio communication.” The aurora borealis, or northern lights, have been known to disrupt radio and telegraph communication, but they sometimes act as a kind of power source for such equipment. In the so-called Great Geomagnetic Storm of 1859, a mass solar ejection supercharged the telegraph lines between Boston and Portland, Maine. Operators on either end were able to continue their transmissions with their power systems switched off. But that was not the case on this night. Pallo was cut off, and he had not yet told Korolev that he didn’t know if the dogs were alive.