Laika’s story also raises questions about human empathy, about what we are willing to risk in the spirit of science and exploration, both of animals and of ourselves. It offers a glimpse into the hearts of the Soviet scientists and engineers who worked with her, and into the hearts of us all. The scientists’ relationship with Laika tells us something, perhaps, of what has changed for us in the years since Sputnik. What does it mean, for example, that Cold War Soviet scientists were not inhumane and heartless, as Western protesters insisted and the press reported, but were, in fact, caring, sensitive, and empathetic?
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas tells us that it is in face-to-face relationships that empathy, and thus ethical behavior, becomes possible. To face another human being, to encounter them, is to come into an ethical relationship with them. Ethical behavior toward other human beings extends, it seems to me, to ethical behavior toward other species and toward the whole of nature. In this light, it is essential, I think, to consider the way we communicate and build personal relationships with other human beings in the twenty-first century. Even as our technologies enhance us, possibly make us better, we must also ask what we may have lost. Our obsessive use of communications technologies—chiefly smartphones and computers with internet access—has brought the world together, but it has also separated us, cutting us off from the kind of face-to-face encounters that Levinas writes about. What are the results of this recent phenomenon? What is its future? How do these technologies advance us as we become more and more dependent on them? How do they limit us?
With all these considerations, Laika really belongs to the world. She was a Russian dog with a Russian heart, a stray from the streets of Moscow, a creature of the Soviet experiment, but once lofted into space she was not fixed or bound to any one place, to any one people. She belonged to no one and to everyone, the first living creature from Earth to go where no nation, no corporation, and no individual has any claim. In looking at Laika’s story and at the scientists and engineers who worked with her, perhaps we can better understand human empathy—its source, its importance, and the dangers of its reduction and loss—in order to posit that empathy is essential to caring for our world, to maintaining it as a place where we may all live healthy, productive lives as part of what the writer Wendell Berry has called “the feast of creation.”
When the Soviet team went to select a space dog to launch in Sputnik II, Laika earned high marks. In her training she managed the extreme conditions of the centrifuge and the vibration table, and she kept a calm and even disposition during prolonged periods of isolation in the training capsule (up to twenty days). She did not become aggressive or fight with her kennel mates, as so many smaller dogs are prone to do. The women and men who worked with her describe her as sweet-natured, patient, and determined, a dog that wanted to please, a dog talented in adapting to the place and the people with whom she found herself. She was a survivor, a quality that saw her through that hard life on the streets and, then, the rigorous training in the space dog program. Indeed, Korolev and Yazdovsky both knew that street dogs made the best space dogs, because they were tough, scrappy, and they could endure extremes of temperature, hunger, and isolation.
And yet Laika was not the most qualified dog for Sputnik II. The team felt strongly that a dog called Albina was the best choice. Albina was a favorite among the scientists and engineers, “a celebrity who had twice been in research rockets at the height of hundreds of kilometers,” writes engineer Oleg Ivanovsky (under the pen name Aleksei Ivanov) in The First Steps: An Engineer’s Notes. Albina had flown both times with a dog called Kozyavka, or Little Gnat, in June 1956. Having already proven herself in flight, she was the perfect choice for Sputnik II, but had she not risked enough? Didn’t she deserve something for the contribution she had already made? Retirement, perhaps, a soft bed in a warm house? Albina had something else going for her too: she had just given birth to a litter of puppies, three little pups, one of which looked a lot like Laika. Yazdovsky thought it too cruel to take the mother from her pups and subject her again to the risks of rocket flight.
Ordinary rocket flight was risk enough, but Sputnik II was not going to be an ordinary flight. Khrushchev had ordered the launch for no later than November 7, 1957, in time to celebrate the Bolshevik Revolution, which was about a month after Sputnik I. The Soviets knew how to send a dog to the edge of space on a rocket and bring it back safely with a system of parachutes (they had achieved this many times), but they did not know how to return a dog from orbit. It had never been done before. The know-how and hardware just didn’t exist. That kind of research and development took time, and the Soviet team was in a mad race against the clock, and against the United States, to again achieve the impossible. So unlike previous and later rocket trials using dogs, the dog chosen to fly on Sputnik II was not just taking a risk, it was never coming back. The dog chosen for Sputnik II was going to die in space or perhaps on the ride into space. Whatever, it was going to die.
So which dog to choose: Laika or Albina?
For the team, it was a tough choice, but a choice had to be made. Ivanovsky records this moment in The First Steps: “The great majority inclined to send Laika into space. Everyone knew that the animal would die, and there was no way to bring her back to Earth, because we did not know how to do that. So it was particularly painful to send Albina, everyone’s darling, to her death. Thus, Laika became the first.” By the first, Ivanovsky means “the primary,” as all the space dogs scheduled to fly were assigned a second, or a backup, in case something happened to prevent the primary from flying. Albina, then, was named Laika’s second. Ivanovsky’s words also mean that Laika would be first into orbit, first for the glory of the Soviet Union, and first for all time. And she would also be the first, and the only, dog in the Soviet space dog program to be sent to her death.
Laika’s capsule on Sputnik II contained a small, round window. While the satellite, along with Laika and her capsule, were destroyed on reentry, the window is plainly visible in photographs and drawings, and in a replica at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow. The window, Asif Siddiqi told me, measured about 6.3 inches in diameter and was made of transparent thermoplastic, called Perspex. Questions surrounding the window’s purpose stand as a lodestar for this book, out of which a central metaphor has arisen. Wearing a flight suit to secure the sensors implanted in her body, Laika was positioned inside a small chamber within the capsule so that, while she was able to stand, to sit, to lie down, and to move about a little, she was unable to turn around. The design meant that she faced the window looking out. Was this the sole reason for the window, so that Laika could look out at the Earth as she left it? Or did scientists believe that the view or, more so, the entry of natural light would help calm her as she endured the thrust of the rocket and then the strange sensation of weightlessness? Or was the window installed to serve the scientists only, to monitor Laika before she was loaded onto the rocket? What were these scientists’ intentions? After launch, of course, the sole user of the window was Laika, a window through which she looked at what? Did Laika take in the first view of Earth from space and look beyond it into the cosmos? Could she in fact see out? And if she could, what did she see from up there? What did she see down here? Or was the view from Laika’s window occluded by darkness, blocked by the payload fairing protecting the satellite as it rose into orbit? More specifically, did the Soviet team remove the payload fairing after Sputnik II achieved orbit?