On the morning of November 3, 1957, Ivanovsky looked out from the observation site at Baikonur to see the rocket that would carry Laika into space sitting on the launchpad, a “bright, white rocket, like a candle, standing out against the cloudless and blue November sky,” he writes. Everyone was there watching. Korolev was there, dignitaries and government officials from Moscow, scientists and engineers. Some held binoculars to bring the rocket in closer. The loudspeakers crackled, and a voice gave the ten-minute alert. Then one minute. And then a series of instructions, followed by a final command: “Launch!”
The engines fired, a great plume of smoke and dust and fire spreading out like a flower against the ground. With the engines ablaze, the rocket seemed to sit on the pad a moment, a moment more, and then it rose smoothly into a space above the pad as if hovering there, not sure if it should stay or go, and then it went, accelerating as it rose, faster and faster, that bright burning flare of the engines running beneath it, bright as the sun. The rocket made a long bright line high above and to the east, Ivanovsky reports, and as the first-stage booster separated “beautiful ripples appeared in the sky,” ripples that could be seen as far downrange as Alma-Ata, just north of the great Issyk-Kul Lake in present-day Kyrgyzstan. Those ripples dissipated, and the rocket kept going in its speed, so high and away that it was beyond where anyone could see, beyond the Karman line, beyond the Earth and on into orbit, into that slip of space between where everyone is and where no one had yet to go.
“Laika flew off,” Ivanovsky writes. “We rushed to the cars and headed to the telemetry stations where radio signals of Laika’s heartbeat would be received, as if by an invisible wire. Was she alive? Did she survive the take-off, the g-forces, the vibration?”
“It was a historic event,” said Alexander Seryapin in Space Dogs. “Standing seven kilometers from the launch pad, you can feel the Earth vibrating. And then the sound of the engines. You know it gives you the shudders.” As he stood watching the rocket, tears came into Seryapin’s eyes imagining Laika in her capsule. “I thought it was just me who felt that way,” he said. “For the first time, I saw men really weep when they were told that Laika had gone into orbit.”
Inside the telemetry station, Alexander Dmitrievich studied the information coming in from Sputnik II. Then he raced to the door and threw it open, nearly tumbling out. Ivanovsky was there and some others were approaching, obviously in want of the news. He “threw the thumbs-up to us,” Ivanovsky writes, “all right! It was a victory. Laika was alive! She was whizzing above the earth, unaware of what was happening to her and where she actually was.” The telemetry signals from Laika, the fact that her heart was beating, her lungs were drawing breath, she was moving about a little, meant that the team had proven “that it was possible to live in space, in the mysterious and unexplored world!” Ivanovsky writes.
More information came in. During launch, Laika’s heart rate increased to more than 260 beats per minute, about three times normal for a dog. Her respiration increased too, to about five times normal. When the satellite entered orbit and microgravity, Laika’s heart rate began to slow, along with her breathing, and then stabilized. She stabilized, sitting in her capsule, calmer now, the capsule familiar to her but for the strange sensation of microgravity. She was not floating about the cabin, as the restraining chains and the small space she occupied prevented that, but she would have sensed the immense g-force pushing down on her during the flight, and then suddenly nothing. According to the medical team on the ground, Laika had endured the launch well, and now she was up there, shooting around the planet at 17,500 miles per hour in an elliptical orbit with a 140-mile perigee and a 1,039-mile apogee. At this speed and orbit, Laika made one revolution around the Earth in about 103 minutes. She was now the fastest dog that ever lived.
The space dogs that had gone beyond the Karman line before Laika had lingered in microgravity for only a few minutes. With Laika in orbit indefinitely, the ground team could investigate the effect of microgravity on a living being over time. The team needed at least twenty minutes of data from Laika’s sensors to make an initial assessment. The ground stations could only receive data for fifteen minutes before Sputnik II flew out of range. It would have to do. Using that data, the team determined that Laika’s vitals had returned to normal, oxygen levels in the capsule were adequate to support life, and the capsule did not lose pressure after entering the vacuum of space. Laika’s flight had just proven that microgravity was tolerable for a human being in orbit. What the limits were no one yet knew, but Korolev and his team were now confident that they could build a rocket and a capsule that could take a man safely into orbit. One day Earth orbit would teem with satellites and cosmonauts working on orbital space stations, but for now it was Laika alone who was sailing in the resolution of the stars.
When I spoke with American astronaut Donald Pettit, I asked him about the experience of rocket flight. What did it feel like to fly? An astronaut experiences a great deal of noise and vibration, he said, but from inside a space suit that noise and vibration is minimized. In a Soyuz-type rocket (the kind of rocket Laika flew in), the force against the body is about 3–4g, Pettit told me. The result, he said, is that “you’re pushed pretty hard into your seat.” But you are pushed pretty hard into your seat on an increasing scale as the rocket accelerates and then only for about eight minutes, or until the rocket enters microgravity. That 600 pounds is reduced suddenly and dramatically, but it is not reduced to zero. The term “zero gravity” is misleading because there is plenty of gravity in orbit. If there were no gravity in orbit, there would be no orbit at all. In zero gravity, a satellite or the ISS would simply fly off into the great unknown, the moon would not be the Earth’s constant companion, and the solar system, even the galaxy itself, would not hold together. Gravity on a spacecraft in orbit is about 88.8 percent of what it is on Earth. The reason astronauts and objects float in Earth orbit is not because there is no gravity. They float because the spacecraft and everything in it is falling around the Earth at the same velocity. To be in orbit is to be in a continuous state of free fall, the spacecraft and everything in it, falling back to Earth. But in orbit a spacecraft’s velocity is in equilibrium with gravity so that it will never reach the surface. The spacecraft falls around the Earth, and it just keeps falling.
Human astronauts ride into space positioned on their back because it’s easier to breathe. They can inflate their lungs upward into the empty space above them. Lying on their bellies doesn’t work, because under the force of 3 or 4g, astronauts would have to inflate their lungs by pushing the now tremendous weight of their body upward, again and again, for eight minutes. It would be like trying to breathe while lying on your belly with two or three people sitting on top of you. An astronaut’s blood can flow almost normally while positioned on his or her back, as the force of acceleration is acting laterally on the body. If the body is vertical to the force of acceleration (toe to head, or head to toe), blood either rushes away from the brain, which can cause a loss of consciousness, or it rushes to the brain, which can cause cerebral hemorrhaging and possibly death.
In The First Steps, Ivanovsky describes film footage of rats riding into space on a rocket. “While taking off and accelerating, rats slow down, their legs are wide apart, their heads go lower and lower, and finally hit the floor,” he writes. “The g-force presses an animal down to the floor, and it stops moving, its muscles cannot cope with the increased weight.” He goes on to say that a “few seconds later the animal suddenly takes off from the floor and for a moment hangs somewhere in the middle of the box. No support! The rat begins to move randomly in the box. It goes from turning around its axis to flying into the corner, from spinning, like a spindle, to somersaulting.” As weight is a primary indicator of up and down for all terrestrial animals on Earth, the rats lose “the sense of up and down, and [have] no points of support and no signals from legs and tail are being delivered. Only the vision continues on normally, but at first [they fail] to deal with the chaos of other perceptions.”