Remember the famed 1972 photograph of the first full view of the Earth taken from the American spacecraft Apollo 17 on its way to the moon? That single image, known as the Blue Marble, is one of the most reproduced photographs in human history. Why? Because it, more than any other image, brings human beings face-to-face—and for the first time—with the vulnerability and special quality of our planet home. Because that photograph allows us to see, to witness, even to feel that the Earth is fragile, and its fragility makes it beautiful. Because that image brings us all to square with what we have always known: that we have but one home, one Earth, and we must take care of it, if we are to survive. “[The Earth] truly is an oasis,” said Apollo 15 commander Dave Scott in an interview for the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, “and we don’t take very good care of it. I think the elevation of that awareness is a real contribution to saving the Earth.” It’s a jewel, he said, the “jewel of the Earth hanging in the blackness of space.”
On April 12, 1961, some four years after Laika’s mission, the Soviet Union put the first human being into orbit, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. During his single orbit of the Earth, Gagarin gazed back on our planet home. He could not see the Earth entire as the Apollo astronauts would as they sailed away from it, but he was the first human being to look down from up so high. “Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is,” Gagarin later wrote. “People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it.” Gagarin’s is a necessary plea, and further evidence that seeing the Earth from space changes the fundamental way we think of ourselves, making it difficult to see ourselves as superior to other living beings, as the inheritors of a planet filled with resources and placed here for us, as made in the image of a benevolent god. Seeing the Earth from space, we must face a terrifying reality: that we are fragile, vulnerable, and possibly alone. What shall we do with this new point of view? How shall we account for who and what we are, and for the fragility and essentiality of our planet?
Did Laika see this sight too? Did Laika see it first? And what value is there in knowing, or not knowing, that she did?
Whether she could or not, by imagining the view from Laika’s window—from the inside of her capsule looking out—perhaps we can learn more about her and more about ourselves too: who we are as a species, with our appetite for exploration and knowledge, our appetite for power too, running side by side with our compassion, our empathy, and even our love for the planet we live on.
And Laika’s story is about loneliness, about loneliness as fundamental to being human. If we can trust poet Sylvia Plath, loneliness is an assertion of our need for each other, our need for “another soul to cling to.” In clinging to another soul, we do find comfort, but we lose that comfort to partings, breakups, wars, death, as if the universe itself is so hinged as to cycle us through loneliness and comfort and then loneliness again like seasons turning across the years. These seasons of losses are the linchpins of all this loneliness, loneliness no human being can escape. In response to it, we cast our net into the cold, black cosmos, our net of satellites, telescopes, rovers, probes, spacecraft, space stations: is anything out there? Is anyone out there? And we send our dogs out too, out into the void to help us with the question we all hope to answer: are we alone in the universe? Are we special, or are we instead rather ordinary because life abounds out there? Will it one day be possible to establish fellowship with other beings on other worlds? Whether we will or not, human life is without meaning without one another, and without animals; all we have is each other. As the novelist Kurt Vonnegut stated in a 1974 commencement address, “The most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
Laika’s story, then, is important because it draws us into an ethical relationship with animals we depend on, specifically with dogs as our companions in cosmic exploration. We are operating here in our search of the heavens at the very limit of our technological capability, and right beside us, with Laika as its apologue, is the dog, the animal with which we share a close evolutionary history. Wherever human beings go, whatever human beings do, our dogs go and do it with us. Sojourning with our dogs on the hunt for answers, even across an ocean of stars, is itself a kind of comfort. If adventure and exploration are evidence of an innate loneliness in the human animal, they are also an antidote to that loneliness. Space exploration, ultimately, may be a search for a cure for loneliness.
Finally, at its core, this book is a story about a dog. It is a biography of sorts, a portrait, a memorial. This book belongs to Laika and to all the space dogs who traveled before and after her. Through the stories of their journeys into space, perhaps we will all find ourselves a little more grounded here on Earth.
In order to understand Laika’s story, it is important to come to know some of the other animals that have flown into space, who sent them and why, and what benefit, if any, resulted from their missions. It is also essential to acquaint ourselves with the stories of the other space dogs, those that flew before Laika, and those that flew after. Chapter 2, “Animals in the Heavens,” traces the story of animals in space from the earliest documented flights in hot air balloons in the eighteenth century to the animals that are part of the ongoing science aboard various satellites and on the ISS. Since the 1970s, robotic rovers and probes have mostly replaced nonhuman animal explorers and have been loosely remade in their image. While this book is not an indictment of research using animals, and it is especially not an indictment of the Soviet scientists, or any others, who launched animals into space, it does ask questions about the value of such research weighed against the suffering of the animals.
Chapter 3, “The Making of a Space Dog,” returns to the story of Laika to detail her training and includes generally the training that all Soviet space dogs endured. It also introduces Sergei Korolev, the Soviet chief designer, whose single-purpose life serves as a balefire for humanity’s entrance into the Space Age. This chapter prepares the way to better understand the specific details of Laika’s flight on Sputnik II. Chapter 4, “Scouting the Atmosphere,” features the stories of the most notable space dog flights before and after Laika. While a few of these flights rival Laika’s for achievement in endurance and advancements in technology, it is clear that she serves as a tipping point in space exploration, beyond which the dream of exploring nearby and distant planets opened into a kind of fever from which humanity has never recovered. Now that we know space travel is possible, it seems to me, we are no longer content with living solely on Earth. This chapter also brings us to the conclusion of Korolev’s story and positions him as the man who matched, if not exceeded, the achievements of the greatest minds in space exploration. Like Laika, he will forever be listed among those who did it first and those who did it best.