Frustrated, I wondered if traveling to the source might give me an answer. In June 2016 I toured the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow. On the first floor near the stuffed space dogs Belka and Strelka is a replica of Sputnik II. The outer shell of the satellite is cut away so you can see inside. You can see the cylindrical instrument package on top, the sphere housing the batteries and radio transmitters in the middle, and, nested in the bottom, Laika’s capsule with its window. The fairing is perhaps half an inch thick at best. It appeared to me that the fairing was not designed to come off. Of course it is a replica, and some of its design features may have been left out. It is always best to ask. My guide, a space industry professional who worked on the Soviet Union’s defunct shuttle program, the Buran, gave me a firm and clear answer: “No,” she said in English. “Definitely not. Laika could not see out.”
Back in the United States, Cathleen Lewis at the Smithsonian put me in contact with Art Dula, a Houston attorney specializing in intellectual property and space law. Dula was just then in Moscow and soon to meet with a Russian colleague named Evgeny Albats, who for twenty-eight years worked for Zvezda (reorganized as Joint Stock Company in 1994). At Zvezda, Albats worked closely with colleagues at Energia, the company that designed and built Laika’s capsule. According to Albats, the fairing on Sputnik II was indeed removed in orbit and, he wrote to me, for a time “the dog could see the sky.” Excited by this lead, I inquired further. Is the source for this information published? How do I get access to it? Is the source in English, or will I need help with translation? How could my guide in Moscow get this wrong? But Albats could offer no more help.
There must be a published source, I reasoned, that would answer the question definitively. The challenges to finding it had so far kept me adrift in uncertainties: I had little success getting help from people who work in the Russian space industry. I did not have the security clearance or scholarly authority to access Russian archives. I do not speak or read Russian, which, without a translator, made access to these archives useless. I was just a writer trying to tell the story of a dog. The answer to my question remained beyond my reach.
I thought this was the end of it.
Then I raised the matter with Fordham University historian Asif Siddiqi. A Guggenheim fellow who has written a number of seminal works on Soviet space history and exploration, Siddiqi directed me to volume 1 of Problemy kssmicheskoi biologii (Problems in space biology), edited by N. M. Sisakian. This Russian-language source (Siddiqi is fluent in Russian) offers a detailed account of the Sputnik II mission. It clearly states in a diagram, Siddiqi told me, that the fairing was removed in orbit, exposing Laika’s capsule, and so her window, to space.
At last here was my answer, and it posed another question: with the fairing removed and the window exposed to space, what did Laika see?
Before I could approach this question, a final, curious detail came to light. In my correspondence with James Schombert, an observational astronomer at the University of Oregon and formerly with NASA, he mentioned, almost passively, that if Laika could see out her window, she may well have had a dizzying view, because Sputnik II was spinning. In all my research, how could I have missed this essential detail? Then I recalled a terse phrase in Chernov and Yakovlev’s paper that I had passed over: “In the flight of the satellite, in spite of its slow revolution, weightlessness was always practically complete.” I read those words again: “in spite of its slow revolution.” It really was spinning. I asked Schombert for more information. “The combined system [of Sputnik II] had no attitude control (jets or gyros),” he said. “The whole rocket was given spin on lift-off. This is standard procedure and is achieved by small side rockets on the first stage. It appears from the science reports that some of this rotation was still in place when [the satellite reached orbit].”
I asked Gil Moore what he knew about the spin stabilization of Sputnik II. “I do know that the second, third, and fourth stages of the Jupiter C launch vehicle that orbited Explorer I, as well as the third stage of the Vanguard launch vehicle that orbited Vanguard I, were spun up,” he said. “Since I saw for myself the repetitive sunlight flashes in the twilight sky from the final-stage motor of Sputnik I’s launch vehicle as it tumbled end over end, I would assume that Sputnik II was also spinning.”
While Robert Goddard had developed gyroscopic stabilization for rockets decades before Sputnik II, it was not yet standard hardware. In 1957 the easiest and most inexpensive way to stabilize a rocket in flight was to spin it, because when you spin an object it becomes a kind of gyro itself and highly resistant to changes in attitude. You want the rocket to fly like an arrow shot from a bow, and spinning it around its minor axis, which runs nose to tail, can achieve this. As the rocket gains altitude and enters orbit, it loses energy as its main engines burn out and drop away. Energy dissipation, and imperfections in the load balance of the rocket, causes this spin around the minor axis to become unstable, and the rocket will begin to spin around its major axis, which runs laterally across the center of the rocket body. As the rocket slows down, it begins to tumble end over end. Positioned in the nose cone of the rocket, Laika would have been spinning as if seated in the center of a merry-go-round during the rocket’s flight, and when it entered orbit and started to tumble she would have tumbled with it, like riding a Ferris wheel, around and around. The rate of this spin would have been relatively slow, Schombert told me, not above about one rotation per minute, otherwise “centripetal force would have locked Laika to the wall.”
It is necessary to take an imaginative leap here, for while we now know that Laika could see out and that the satellite was tumbling in its orbit, we cannot know what she saw, if anything. She was dehydrated and near death from her long delay on the ground, but even in her weakened state, as I see it, the answer to this question is that she saw everything. In the tumbling roll of the satellite, the little window turning over and over on the world, Laika was looking at everything there is, everything there ever was, her eyes taking in starlight that traveled across oceans of time to reach her, light from distant galaxies, from across a billion years, and she was looking down on the living Earth from orbit, even if in a chaotic whirl of the satellite’s motion, and she was the first to take in this view. She saw the Earth, the blue marble, fragile, vulnerable, a kind of spaceship itself floating in the black void, impossibly alone. While Ivanovsky claims that Laika was “unaware of what was happening to her and where she actually was,” I think she knew. If a dog is anything, it is sensitive and intuitive, and while Laika would not have had our understanding of orbit and space, I think she understood that something big had happened to her. I think she understood—in what way a dog can—that she had crossed the threshold of our world and was now far away. I think she sensed that she had flown into a forbidden realm, far beyond any place anyone had ever been before, a place so foreign, so formidable, so beyond the ken of the ordinary that it would now be nearly impossible for her to come home.