With these preparations, chapters 5 and 6, “A Face in the Window” and “First Around the Earth,” tell the story of Laika’s flight. In these pages I have assembled—and I think for the first time—an intimate portrait of Laika: where she came from, what she endured, and what her flight means for us all. I use what is known to imagine what cannot be known: Laika’s experience inside her capsule during her time in orbit, for example. Here my purpose is not melodrama or embellishment but witness and understanding. In addition, my research brought me to an as yet unacknowledged truth about Laika’s flight and death, which I hope aids our understanding of her and our understanding of ourselves, which is this book’s main premise.
Finally, the epilogue addresses what comes next in human space exploration and draws a straight line from the aspirations of the earliest rocket scientists in the late nineteenth century, who dreamed of traveling to Mars, to Robert Zubrin and the Mars Society and Elon Musk and his SpaceX in the twenty-first century. While Laika is the Earth’s first space traveler, she was also one scout among many, sent out ahead to gather information to help us all on our journey to the stars.
TWO
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Animals in the Heavens
All the universe is full of the life of perfect creatures.
While Laika was the first living being in orbit, she was not the first living being in space. By the time of Laika’s flight, both the Soviet Union and the United States had been experimenting for a decade with suborbital rocket flights carrying dogs and monkeys, respectively, but also fruit flies, mice, and other living things, just beyond the Karman line (100 kilometers or about 62 miles altitude) that marks the boundary of space. It was the Hungarian American physicist Theodore von Karman who first calculated that at this altitude, the atmosphere becomes too thin to support traditional flight. To navigate, and even to survive, a pilot needed a wholly new kind of craft, not an aircraft at all but a spacecraft lifted into the heavens on the nose of a rocket.
Some of these early experimental rockets carrying animals blew up on the launchpad, some turned and tumbled in the sky and blew up, some flew erratically and strayed off-course and were destroyed by charges inside the rocket detonated by a ground crew, and some rockets flew up and up into space, where they sojourned in microgravity, then turned a delicate arc back to Earth, the braking chutes deploying and slowing the spacecraft for a landing on the ground. And when the scientists and engineers arrived to retrieve those spacecraft and their animal passengers, sometimes they found them dead and sometimes they found them alive. And all of it in pursuit of science to reveal the mysterious conditions of space, and to one day give them confidence enough to risk sending the first human being off the planet. Human spaceflight, human voyages to nearby and distant planets, has always been the goal, even from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the first spacecraft designs took form in the minds of a few visionaries from Russia (later the Soviet Union), Germany, and the United States, among other countries. Sputnik II, carrying Laika, was neither the beginning nor the end. It was one step along a winding path in the exploration of the final frontier, but a giant step to be sure, one for the record books.
Since those early rocket flights in the Soviet Union and the United States, five more nations have flown animals in space: France, Argentina, China, Japan, and Iran. The list of the kinds of animals, and also plants, sent into space is dizzying and includes quail and quail eggs, butterflies, mollusks, various fish, including the mummichog minnow and the oyster toadfish (a hideous beast at best), various mosses, oat and mung bean seedlings, newts, worms of all sorts, and nematodes, which come in all sorts too. Cats, rabbits, rats, Madagascar hissing cockroaches (thanks to Russia), and not to leave out molds, yeasts, crickets, snails, ladybugs, ants, moths, houseflies, fruit flies, gnats, bees, scorpions, spiders, all kinds of cells including chunks of human skin (which are groups of cells), and of course, guinea pigs.
In 2016 SpaceX launched eight species of fungi found growing at the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site in the former Soviet Union into space. Scientists are studying the way these fungi manage radiation, a primary challenge for all living things traveling in space. Also in 2016 several strains of herpes were flown into space to study how and why the virus worsens, and even mutates, in microgravity. Two-thirds of all humans carry herpes, and many of us do not know we carry it. This research is especially important for crew members on long-duration spaceflights. The first flower grown in space is the zinnia, which unfurled on the International Space Station in 2016, and NASA has been growing red romaine lettuce on the station too, studying fresh food production for an eventual journey to Mars. Like rats on sixteenth-century sailing ships, microbes have hitched rides into space in and on spacecraft. A group of scientists are now tracking and studying the microbial life flourishing on the ISS. In fact, a bacterium, Solibacillus kalamii (named after scientist A. P.J. Abdul Kalam, who became the eleventh president of India), has been found only on the ISS—it has not been found on Earth—suggesting that life from Earth can mutate in such a way as to manage life in space, or that life is already out there. And out there on Mars, despite our best efforts to prevent it, microbial life from Earth likely holds on to various landers and surface rovers. In late 2016 NASA steered the Mars rover Curiosity away from possible water sources on the red planet so as not to contaminate them with Earth microbes.
Other objects, too, surprising and strange, have been sent into space, among them the light saber Luke Skywalker used in Return of the Jedi, images of Playboy models secreted away in the task notebooks of Apollo 12 astronauts, a wheel of Gruyère cheese, dinosaur bones, Coke and Pepsi, a Pizza Hut pizza (literally the first out-of-this world delivery), a Buzz Lightyear toy, Amelia Earhart’s watch, and samples of the remains of the late Gene Roddenberry (creator of Star Trek), James Doohan (who played Scotty in the original Star Trek), and astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, whose sample of remains reached Pluto on July 14, 2015, on NASA’s New Horizons probe, because the man discovered it.
As far as anyone knows, the first animal test flight in the history of the world took place on November 19, 1783, at Versailles. This is, of course, not including the certainty that for the past two hundred thousand years, boys have tested the reliability of gravity by cruelly launching little animals off high places. The Montgolfier brothers, Joseph and Étienne, were not cruel boys, however, but young inventors and entrepreneurs with talent in mechanics and science who had been experimenting with hot air balloons for about a year. They arrived at this work, so the story goes, when Joseph, the starry-eyed dreamer with a reputation for reciting Voltaire, was drying his wife’s chemise by the heat of a wood fire. Filling temporarily with hot air, the garment billowed up. In his excitement, Joseph’s mind began to wander: could not a sack or balloon of some kind fill with such air and so be borne aloft? If so, could not a balloon of greater size be constructed, filled with the heat of a fire, and so bear something of weight, a man, for example, up into the sky? With such a balloon, Joseph wondered while clutching his wife’s chemise, was it possible that a man could fly?