Inside the front door of Korolev’s Moscow home, at the foot of the stairs on a table near the telephone, is a sculpture, To the Stars, a replica of a larger original that is mounted on the grounds of the Theater of the Soviet army in Moscow. The first three cosmonauts in space (Gagarin, Titov, and Nikolayev) presented the sculpture to Korolev as a gift. It features the signatures of all eleven cosmonauts who flew in space during Korolev’s lifetime. The sculpture is of Prometheus, his left arm outstretched, releasing a rocket to the stars. He leans dramatically forward, his body bare but for a cloth draped around his waist that flows and snakes about him. The rocket is to go ever upward, and Prometheus has become part of the rocket, launching into the cosmic void on a voyage of discovery and adventure. Behind the sculpture is a staircase leading up to Korolev’s study. The staircase rises a few steps to a landing, where it turns and rises again past a bright and sunny window looking out into the forested park beyond the house. Korolev would often sit on the second step from the top and look out the window through the leaves of the trees. It was here, my guide told me, that Korolev had his best ideas.
In 1966, a month after Korolev’s death, the Soviets launched a final space dog mission. Both the US and the USSR had turned their sights on landing men on the moon, and this flight would test hardware and life-support systems on an extended stay in space. Ugolyok (Little Piece of Coal or Ember) and Veterok (Little Wind), along with other biological experiments, were sent into orbit on Kosmos 110 for a twenty-five-day mission. The dogs would be pushed into an elliptical orbit with an apogee of 560 miles and pass through the lower Van Allen Belt, where radiation levels were measured between six and twenty-five times higher than on flights in lower orbits. In addition to gathering data on the effects of microgravity on the body during a long flight, the team would also come to better understand the effects of exposure to such high doses of radiation.
Ugolyok was a fluffy dog, dark as coal as her name indicates, and bearing a rounded mane about her face, ruffed out like a male lion. She was tall and handsome, a dog of appealing conformation, a dog you might want to take home. Veterok, with her short legs and shorter hair, her ears bent over in most photographs, appears as a kind of sidekick, a dog you would keep only if you had another. For that, they were suitable companions. Video footage of the two dogs on a walk (the caregiver, a woman with a beehive hairdo and wearing a white lab coat and black heels) shows them to be energetic, playful, dogs at the peak of their youth. Turkina notes that both dogs had other names before their flight. Ugolyok had been called Snezhok, which means Snowball, an irony, since she was almost all black. And Verterok had been called Bzdunok, which means Little Fart, perhaps a commentary on her personality or maybe her behavior. Despite the name change, someone, it seems, thought to preserve the humor, as Veterok’s name changed from “little fart” to “little wind.”
During the flight the dogs would take food and water through stomach tubes. Veterok would be administered doses of a new antiradiation serum through an intravenous needle, while Ugolyok would not. The team could then compare the condition of the two dogs when they returned to Earth. If the serum worked, it might be useful in treating cosmonauts on a mission to the moon or possibly for radiation sickness on Earth, a salve for the threat of nuclear war.
An article in Time published a couple weeks after the flight suggests that Ugolyok and Veterok were “moon dogs,” the “immediate predecessors of the moon dogs the Russians have said they intend to send into lunar orbit ahead of man.” Such speculation is corroborated by cosmonaut Gherman Titov (the second human in orbit), when he predicted with some disappointment that dogs would land on the moon before humans. Dogs had become so practiced in spaceflight that the newest space race was not between Soviets and Americans, it seemed, but between humans and dogs.
After twenty days in orbit the team discussed bringing Ugolyok and Veterok back early. The air quality in the capsule was still acceptable, but it was in a state of slow and steady decline. According to Asif Siddiqi in Challenge to Apollo, a landing commission of twenty-five members discussed the issue throughout the night. Yes, they agreed, if the dogs were going to survive, they had to be brought home now. The dogs landed near Saratov, Russia, after twenty-two days in orbit.
Back on the ground, Ugolyok and Veterok emerged from the spacecraft alive but exhausted and disoriented. A later report, writes Siddiqi, notes that the two dogs had lost 30 percent of their body weight and showed signs of “muscular reduction, dehydration, calcium loss, and confusion in readjusting to walking.” According to Turkina, both dogs recovered fully after about ten days and both gave birth to litters of puppies. A Russian writer has claimed that both lost all their hair after returning to Earth, but this claim cannot be substantiated. Whatever became of Ugolyok and Veterok in ensuing years may be less important than their achievement: they set the duration record for space dogs, one that will not be broken until, maybe one day, we take our dogs with us to Mars.
FIVE
¤
A Face in the Window
I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You.
Preparations for Laika’s flight began in Moscow at the Institute of Aviation Medicine where she lived and trained. During its ascent and after the satellite entered orbit, the telemetry system on the spent booster would track Laika’s blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, and movements and send that information to a ground station. To measure a dog’s blood pressure remotely required a blood pressure cuff on a timer that Laika wore around her neck. Anyone who has ever walked a dog on a leash knows that its head and neck are powerfully muscled. That, combined with a good coat of protective fur, makes it nearly impossible for a blood pressure cuff to depress a dog’s carotid artery and so measure its blood pressure. To solve this problem, Gazenko and Yazdovsky performed surgery on Laika to draw her carotid artery out and sew it into a flap of skin close to the surface where the blood pressure cuff could make contact. It was a delicate operation, and it required a good ten days to heal.
To record Laika’s heart rate while she was in orbit, Gazenko and Yazdovsky surgically implanted two silver electrode rings, not more than two-tenths of an inch in diameter, beneath the skin on her chest. To these they attached wires and drew those wires beneath her skin up to the top of her back near her shoulders, one on each side. Laika must have looked like a satellite herself, a little sputnik, with those long antenna-like wires emerging from her back. Albina too underwent both of these surgical procedures, because if something happened to Laika in the final moments before launch, Albina would have to fly.
Equipment to record Laika’s movements and respiration did not require surgery. The harness Laika wore around her chest included a gauge that measured the inflation and deflation of her lungs. Her movements were measured by a wire, this one attached to the outside of her harness and wound onto a spindle drum controlled by a spring at the rear of the capsule. When Laika moved away from the drum, she drew the wire out. When she moved toward the drum, the spring engaged and wound up the slack. A sensor recorded the length of the wire, drawn out or wound up, and the ground crew could then determine if she was moving about and roughly where she was: pressed up against the back of the capsule, somewhere in the middle, or far forward, close to the window.