Night temperatures are cold in Kazakhstan in early winter, cold and dry, and the plain stretches out in every direction. That R-7 rocket must have looked impressive standing out there on the pad, the support towers rising up around it, nothing like it, really, anywhere in the world. The team had made all the preparations, and the launch was scheduled for early morning on November 3. Laika had been inside the capsule now for nearly three days.
The medical staff, led by Yazdovsky and Alexander Dmitrievich, noticed that the pressure in the capsule was slightly higher than when they sealed it on November 1. This was not a problem for Laika, they told Korolev, but it was a problem for science. The pressure inside and outside the capsule had to be equal at the time of launch so that when the rocket went up they could more accurately determine the change in pressure during flight and in orbit, if there was any change at all. An accurate read on the capsule’s pressure change was essential as they moved toward that day, not so far off, when they would send a man into orbit. The only solution, as Yazdovsky and Alexander Dmitrievich saw it, was to open the capsule, normalize the air pressure, and reseal it. So close to launch, this was an odd request, and it might cause a delay, but the investment in this mission was immense—time, money, resources, engineering and political capital, Laika’s life—and no one wanted to miss this opportunity for good science. Korolev granted permission to make the adjustment. In the sources I read, however, there is some question about the authenticity of this permission from Korolev. It is possible that Yazdovsky and Alexander Dmitrievich were denied permission or didn’t ask for it at all. But if either was the case, that information would likely have come out after the launch, and the two men disciplined. I found no such record.
Laika’s capsule had been designed with a breathing opening on the outer shell sealed by a screw cap. Removing that cap was the easiest way to equalize the pressure. Yazdovsky and Alexander Dmitrievich explained the situation to the engineers on site, one of whom was Ivanovsky. It may have required a bit of coaxing and reassurance to convince them that Korolev backed this strange request, that there was time before launch to make this happen. That done, everyone stood by as one of the engineers unscrewed the cap. The pressure now normalized, the cap could go back on, but Yazdovsky and Alexander Dmitrievich had something else in mind.
“They literally attacked me, especially Alexander Dmitrievich,” Ivanovsky writes in The First Steps. “Please, I beg you,” insisted Alexander Dmitrievich, “Let’s water Laika!”
Ivanovsky calls this moment in Laika’s story “a trickery,” and Burgess and Dubbs describe it as “a subterfuge.” Whatever the sneakiness of the plan, after three days inside the capsule Laika needed water. She had eaten all of her space dog food, and while it would have helped with her thirst, it was not enough. She was probably already suffering from dehydration, her body’s systems slowing down. Without water, Laika was not going to live much longer, and she had not even left the ground. “Frankly speaking,” Ivanovsky writes, “we all were willing to comfort Laika’s life in space a little bit.”
In some re-creations of this moment in drawings, books, and animated shorts, the team opens Laika’s window to give her water, but the window was not fixed on a hinge that could be opened. It was sealed tight, all the way around. The capsule too was sealed. It did not include a door but was rather a cylinder with an end-cap, and the end-cap contained the window. If either the window or the end-cap had to be removed to equalize the air pressure, it would have been impossible to complete the job and still launch on time. Korolev would not have given permission for such a delay. The image of Laika with her window open wide, the medical staff and engineers comforting her, giving her water to drink from a bowl, patting her on the head, is a comfort to us, but it is a fiction. The reality was far more clinical.
Alexander Dmitrievich pushed a rubber tube onto the end of a large syringe and filled the syringe with water. In her condition, Laika was probably listless and groggy, perhaps mostly lying with her head down between her front paws stretched out before her, her ears tipped over on the ends. All the activity outside her capsule might have brought her to attention. All the talk and bustle. What was going on out there? I imagine that she could see people moving through the window, and some of them were people she knew, who had fed her, walked her, trained her. And there was Yazdovsky, the man who took her home. “When Laika saw a familiar face through the window,” writes Ivanovsky, “she showed all the signs of canine joy.” What does canine joy look like? Perhaps Laika stood up inside her capsule, the restraining chains restricting her movement. We do not really know. Perhaps she wagged her tail, panted hard at the window, steaming it with her breath, her body wiggling now with the wagging of her tail, her head going back and forth too, her ears moving up and down in her wiggling. And perhaps she barked.
Alexander Dmitrievich dropped the tube through the breathing opening and filled the empty food tray with water. Laika drank. She drank it all and would have taken more, but the opening had to be resealed. Sputnik II was soon to launch. These were the last moments of Laika’s life in human company. The men looked in at her, and she looked out at them. Then, Ivanovsky writes, she “gave a grateful nod led by her wet nose.”
SIX
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First Around the Earth
It made her think of Laika, the dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could the dog possibly be looking at?