![]() She was also fitted with instruments to monitor her movement and vital signs.Īfter the launch, her respiration and heart rate soared but settled back to a more normal level after she'd become more accustomed to weightlessness. The craft was very cramped - she could stand, sit, or lie down, but there wasn't enough space for her to turn around. She was also fitted with a bag to collect waste. Engineers had put in as much life-support equipment as they could, including an oxygen generator, a fan to keep Laika cool, and devices to absorb carbon dioxide and reduce the chance of oxygen poisoning, as well as enough food for seven days. ![]() Since it was so cold, she was kept warm through a hose connected to a heater, and a pair of assistants were required to keep a constant watch on her. Laika was placed in the satellite at Baikonur Cosmodrone three days before the launch, partly to get her acclimated to the spacecraft, partly to keep from having to do a lot of fiddly preparations too close to the launch time. He later wrote, "I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live." Vladimir Yazdovsky, one of the scientists at the launch site, took Laika home with him to play with his children. ![]() She was quieter and more pleasant than some of the other test animals and less likely to quarrel with other dogs. There isn't a lot of info about Laika, but it seems she was a well-liked animal by the staff. They were also trained to eat gelatinous food. They were also placed in centrifuges and in machines designed to simulate loud spacecraft noises, which caused some blood pressure problems. Laika and the other dogs trained for Sputnik 2 ( Albina and Mushka) were kept in very small cages to get them used to the tiny cabin space aboard the satellite, which caused them to stop urinating or defecating. While life in a Soviet test facility was probably a lot nicer than living alone on the streets of Moscow, the testing regimen was still plenty difficult. She was given numerous nicknames during her training - Kudryavka (Russian for "Little Curly"), Zhuchka ("Little Bug"), Limonchik ("Little Lemon") - before they settled on the name Laika, which meant " Barker." After her launch, some Americans called her Muttnik or Curly, but Laika was the name used by almost everyone. Scientists preferred using stray dogs for testing because they figured that dogs that had been on their own in Moscow were probably already able to survive rough conditions, hunger, and extreme cold. She was probably part husky and part terrier. She was an 11-pound Moscow stray, mongrel, about three years old. That's where Laika finally enters the story. Specifically, there would be no way to get the dog launched into orbit back to Earth at all. So with just a month to design, build, and launch a new spacecraft, some of the designers' long-term goals had to be left behind. But Krushchev's deadline meant the engineers moved their dog deadline up as well. But they'd planned to wait another year or so, get some more launches under their belts, and make sure they had all their necessary instrumentation ready before they sent any creatures into orbit. And they'd already sent a dozen dogs up on sub-orbital flights. The designers had always planned to send dogs aloft - no one was even sure if the conditions in space were conducive to the survival of any life at all, so testing on animals was necessary to see if humans could travel to space. They had to come up with something that would be another scientific and propaganda triumph. And because Khrushchev wanted a "space spectacular" - something just as amazing and newsmaking - the designers couldn't just send up a new satellite. It meant "Hey, guys, launch the satellite on November 7th, or you spend the rest of your life in Siberia." The second problem was that Sputnik had taken about four years to build, and Khrushchev wanted the second spacecraft to launch in only a month. The first was that a request from the leader of the USSR wasn't a simple request, to be considered with other options. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was overjoyed by the news and encouraged designers to build another satellite to be launched on November 7, 1957, the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviets nabbed the first great triumph in the space race when they launched Sputnik into orbit in October 1957. There's a lot we don't know about Laika, and most of what we do know has to be put in context of the Soviet Union and the early days of the space race.
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