When the team came to understand that Laika was dead only a few hours into her flight, they continued to report on the success of the launch and the satellite. The Soviets had already been criticized for their space dog program, so they remained silent about Laika’s demise. When I asked Sergei Khrushchev why the team had kept Laika’s death secret, he replied, “It was not kept secret. Because we were not publicizing it does not mean it was kept secret. There was not a way to bring the dog back, so it was understood that the dog would be sacrificed for science. No one knew, really, that the capsule had overheated at the time. It was of no interest to anybody to announce that the dog died, but rather to celebrate the launch.” There was no conspiracy here, Khrushchev was telling me, so much as a continued focus on the achievements of Sputnik II. And those achievements were real. Laika was always going to die, so did it matter that she died sooner or later, before or after? The satellite was in orbit, and no nation on Earth had achieved such a towering technological feat except the Soviet Union, and they had now done it twice.
Still, the Soviets were practiced at neglecting to report or even record embarrassing failures. It was policy to demonstrate Soviet power and achievement to the world, as it was policy to do the same in the United States. What benefit was there in offering the long trail of trials and mistakes? “It’s mostly lost now in the enormity of those achievements,” Dubbs told me, “but [Laika’s death] was a failure of technology, or rather of Soviet philosophy. Laika was sacrificed as much for political expedience as for advancing the space program, and the Soviets did not want to advertise their failures.”
The day after the launch, the media reported that the dog—who was still without a name in most countries outside the Soviet Union—was doing fine and might yet be recovered. The next day, November 5, the satellite dominated the news again, with articles speculating about the dog’s return, articles expressing outrage at sending a dog at all, and articles supporting the choice as a necessary step in human spaceflight. Turkina writes in Soviet Space Dogs that Radio Moscow issued this statement to the greater Soviet Union: “Although we are filled with sympathy and sorrow for little Laika, at the same time we cannot divert our attention from the enormous significance of her sacrifice for scientific research.” The announcement does not indicate knowledge of Laika’s death but of her eventual death. It is a call for sympathy and sorrow in preparing the public for that inevitability, at least in the Soviet Union.
Protests broke out in the West. In London members of the National Canine Defense League met with the first secretary of the Soviet Embassy to protest and called for a worldwide daily minute of silence until Laika was returned home. In New York City a picket line formed in front of the United Nations offices. In a telegram to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, an animal adoption group characterized Sputnik II as an atrocity. In Sputnik: The Shock of the Century, Dickson reports that the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals deplored using a dog to test a technology that could not “possibly advance human health and welfare.” A New York Times editorial characterized the dog in space as the “shaggiest, lonesomest, saddest dog in all history.” On November 6 an Australian newspaper reported that the dog in the satellite was called Laika.
Soviet scientists were still reporting telemetry signals coming in from Sputnik II as late as November 7, which was in fact true. Laika was dead, but onboard instruments were sending back information about radiation levels and cosmic rays in orbit. On November 10 Sputnik II’s batteries went flat and all telemetry transmissions ceased. Radio Moscow affirmed this on November 11, and then on November 12 the Soviets announced to the world that Laika was dead.
For the next several decades various Soviet publications offered conflicting accounts of Laika’s death. The Soviets acknowledged that Laika could not have been brought back, and so they had euthanized her quickly, painlessly, humanely. Some sources say that Laika had been fed a poison in her food. Others say a poisonous gas was released into her capsule. Some report she was injected automatically with a poisonous serum. Still other reports had Laika dying of asphyxiation when the oxygen supply in her capsule ran out. These stories faded with time as the world turned to other affairs. Then in 1993, at work on Animals in Space, co-author Colin Burgess met with Oleg Gazenko in Vienna at the Association of Space Explorers congress. In that conversation, Gazenko confirmed that Laika had died “soon after launch” of heat exhaustion.
If the Soviets had developed the technology to return Laika to Earth and made the decision to bring her back when her capsule started heating up, it would have done little good. She would have died anyway. There was not enough time to get her to the ground and release her from the capsule to cool her down. The team had discussed how to deal with a problem like this, how to euthanize Laika by some mechanism they controlled from the ground so that she didn’t suffer. “We had wanted an option to kill Laika,” Seryapin said in Space Dogs. “Laika would be put out of her misery within a few seconds. Some say it was planned that way, but I don’t know. It didn’t happen, and Laika died a slow and painful death that lasted about an hour and a half to two hours.”
I think Laika’s death lasted much longer than two hours. I think she started dying the moment they put her in the capsule. After the first day inside the capsule, while still on the ground, she began to suffer from dehydration despite the team’s efforts, despite their love and care for her. By the time she entered orbit she had been inside the capsule for three days with only the water in her space dog food and the little water she received from Yazdovsky and Alexander Dmitrievich through the breathing hole. By the time the temperature began to rise inside her capsule in orbit, her suffering must have been at an end, for she would have mostly been gone already. For Laika to survive in space for seven days was an impossibility. She had no chance.
The story of Laika’s death, when and how she died, did not come to light until 2002. Dimitri Malashenkov, who had worked on the Sputnik II project, gave a paper entitled “Some Unknown Pages of the Living Organism’s First Orbital Flight” at the World Space Conference in Houston, Texas. With this paper, Malashenkov explained to the world for the first time that Laika had died not after seven days in orbit but after several hours. “After ground simulation of the flight conditions the conclusion has been made,” he writes, “that Layka should be lost from an overheating on 3–4 circuit of flight,” meaning between the third and fourth orbit. Written in what appears to be Malashenkov’s English, not in translation, he goes on to remark that “it was practically impossible to create a reliable system of a temperature control in such small term.”
When you travel to a place that is not your own, it is best to have a guide. You need help from a guide who knows where you are going, who has been there before, who can point out its dangers and pleasures and subtleties. On our journey into space, Laika was that guide for us. She was our scout, a star dog, a cyborg, a highly trained cosmonaut, the first cosmonaut, the first space traveler, an explorer in her own right. We followed her into Earth orbit and from there found our courage and journeyed to the moon. After the hollow years of World War II and on into the Cold War night terrors of global nuclear devastation, we all needed something to believe in, something to sustain our broken spirits. A trained soldier of the Cold War, a war dog, Laika emerged from that hostility to forge a new season of cooperation in space between the USSR, the US, and other nations, whose governments had so polarized the world, so cultivated a climate of fear, that we were living in the shadow of our mutual destruction. Had those rockets all been missiles, we would have no science in space, no space exploration; we would have only war. But a dog—even a war dog—doesn’t believe in war. A dog believes only in the task at hand. In space, Laika flew over all our troubles, all our pettiness, and opened a window on our world and on the cosmos, and through that window we could all see that the grand design was so much grander, more mysterious, more vast and empty and dark and filled with light than we had imagined. We came to understand that only in combining our resources—our science and technology, our political wills, our economies, our cultures and our art—could we explore that mystery. Laika was not a lab animal, not the subject of experimentation, not a victim of human ambition. She was an extension of the men and women who trained her, an extension of the Soviet Union, and an extension of us all. She was an extension of our desire for cosmic exploration, our desire to know, our desire to cast our voices into the dark and listen for what might be returned. She was the sacrificial being to an idea we had of ourselves—our better natures—the animal representation of what we all wish to be. And it is because of Laika that we can have this wish. She represents for us the threshold between the past and the future, between terrestrial life on Earth and a life unbounded among the stars. She is the line between gravity and microgravity, between confinement and freedom, between the known and the unknown, between Earth-faring and space-faring, between the terrestrial and the celestial. Laika crossed all these thresholds for us so that we could learn how to do it ourselves. She was, herself, a satellite, just as we are a satellite of her, following her off and away into the unknown dark.