We know that loneliness can be a major health challenge for human beings, that it crushes people and keeps them crushed, and that the lonelier they are, the lonelier they get. Cacioppo has determined that loneliness can contribute to problems like high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, heart attack, stroke, and even death. You can die from loneliness. Loneliness can cause inflammation in the body; problems with learning and memory; cognitive decline and dementia; a reduction in the efficiency and virus-fighting ability of the body’s immune system. Lonely people don’t sleep well either, so sleep is not as restorative as it might be. Loss of sleep or interrupted sleep can in turn contribute to more loneliness. And loneliness itself contributes to more loneliness, putting a lonely person in a downward spiral that becomes tougher and tougher to climb out of. The most terrible poverty is loneliness, Mother Teresa taught us. We cannot be prosperous human beings, it turns out, if we are chronically lonely.
Loneliness cannot be avoided, but it can be transcended. To transcend it we must connect with other beings. “As a meaning, the essence of loneliness consists in the overwhelming desire of the yet-unrelated ego to locate, unify, connect, or bind itself in relation to other egos (even animal egos, pets) or objects (e.g., hobbies, amusements),” writes Mijuskovic. The path to transcending loneliness—for human beings and for dogs—is social interaction and acceptance, establishing and maintaining a rich web of relationships, a community, or as Macbeth puts it in Shakespeare’s play, “troops of friends.”
I was first drawn to Laika’s story by imagining what she saw out her window from space, that her view might have offered her relief from the anxiety of confinement, from boredom, and, yes, from loneliness. I imagined the inside of her capsule illuminated by moonshine, and in that brightness, her gaze drawn out onto the bright orb of the moon, and farther still into the blackness of the cosmic deep. She would have seen her reflection too, or a ghost of it, as the dark interior of the capsule was matched by the mostly black of space. I imagined her looking down (or what appears to us as down) onto our cities illuminated on the planet’s surface as she passed through the nighttime and then around into day and over the tracks of the Earth’s great rivers, long blue spindles running out to the seas, the green of tropical forests, the white matte of winter clouds in the northern hemisphere, circulating storms over the southern oceans, the ocean itself, its impossible blue. I imagined that she saw all that, and as she did, I wondered what she wondered, what she thought about what she saw, and what she felt. I hoped that the view out her window calmed her and gave her a sense of peace into which she died.
In working on this book, I read a great number of books and articles, and I talked with a great number of people who knew Laika’s story better than I did. The questions I posed again and again were: Could Laika, in fact, see out her window when she was in space? Was what I had imagined true? Was it Laika, not Gagarin, who was the first living being to see Earth from orbit? Some sources affirmed that Laika could see out her window into space. Others were either not so sure or mostly uninterested in this detail. What did it matter anyway? A few people I spoke with confessed that no one had ever asked them this question, and they simply didn’t know. Still other sources led me to a resounding no, Laika would not have been able to see out the window. But I did not want to vacillate in this emptiness of no and yes, and I don’t know; I wanted a definitive answer. I wanted proof.
The issue is the fairing on the nose cone of the rocket. When you look at a rocket—United Launch Alliance’s dependable Atlas V, for example—you see a long, smooth booster body rising up from the ground, and then about three-quarters of the way to the top, an elongated bulb on the nose of it. This elongated bulb is the payload, the spacecraft or probe or satellite to be deployed in space. Covering it is a protective shell called a fairing. When the rocket enters orbit, the final-stage booster is usually jettisoned along with the fairing, which releases the spacecraft inside. Free from the rocket and its protective shell, the spacecraft can meet its mission goals, whatever those are. The question about Laika’s view from her window centers on whether the Soviet team removed the fairing from the satellite when it reached orbit.
Some of the people I spoke with told me that if the goal was to simply get the satellite into orbit it made little sense for the team to take the time (time they didn’t have) to install the hardware necessary to remove the fairing. Even if the team had the time, the required hardware and pyrotechnics would have added extra weight to the vehicle. One reason the final-stage booster was not jettisoned from Sputnik II was to reduce the rocket’s overall weight. Removing the fairing would have added more weight as well as cost and time.
But there is another way of looking at this. “If I were flying that mission, I would have jettisoned the nosecone [fairing],” Gil Moore told me. “Leaving the nosecone on, which covered the satellite, would have interfered with their ability to measure the cosmic ray environment Laika was exposed to in orbit. They would have had better results if the nosecone was removed. And I can’t imagine the extra weight of the hardware to remove the nosecone would have made a difference to that R-7 rocket. It had twenty-five engines. Twenty-five!” He continued: “They had to get the nosecone out of the way when they deployed Sputnik I, so the hardware to do that had already been developed. And I would think that with Sputnik II, they would have wanted to get that nosecone out of the way. But I don’t know definitively. I wasn’t there, and the Soviets worked in secret. Besides,” Moore said, “exposing the window for Laika would have been good preparation for Gagarin, who did have a view of the Earth from orbit.”
Amy Nelson, who has written a number of articles about Laika and the Soviet space dogs, agrees. Without offering evidence, she told me she thinks Laika could see out her window.
Where, I wanted to know, was proof?
I discovered an article about Sputnik II in Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, published ten days after the satellite launched. In that article, I read, “After the last stage of the rocket was established on its orbit, the protective cone was discarded.” That sounded clear enough, but during these years Pravda was as much propaganda as it was historical record. My research into Laika’s story had all along been a slow sifting of misinformation—some of it intentional and some of it misunderstanding—most of which eventually fell away as I continued to read. Still, I could not accept this single source for truth. I needed more.
Then I discovered the work of Anatoly Zak, an authority on Soviet and Russian space history. On his informative website russianspaceweb.com, Zak includes a design drawing of Sputnik II with the “payload fairing release mechanism” clearly labeled, along with a short animation of the fairing coming off to expose the satellite. His site also offers an artist’s rendering of the satellite in orbit with the Earth visible below. You can see the final-stage booster still attached and the satellite on top of the booster with the fairing removed. The detail is fine enough to identify Laika’s capsule. Zak includes the following caption for that image: “Perched on top of a giant rocket, a tiny window could provide a glimpse of the home planet to the first creature ever sent to orbit the Earth.” I contacted Zak to discuss this detail and hear more about his sources. Where was this information? Could he help me get to the original source he used? Unfortunately, even after repeated invitations, he declined to speak with me.