Dogs in Space: Meet the Soviet Union space programme’s unsung heroes

Today is the 60th anniversary of Laika – a Moscow stray – being blasted off Earth to become the first dog in space. In honour of the occasion, here is Duncan Geere’s piece on the full history of the Soviet’s canine space team.

Dogs have been man’s best friend for tens of thousands of years. Their superior tracking abilities made them invaluable to early hunter-gatherers.

This relationship persists today, but the apex of the bond of friendship between the two species may have come in 1957, when a three-year-old mongrel was picked up on the streets of Moscow. She weighed about six kilograms and was thought to be part-husky and part-terrier. She was given various nicknames, including Kudryavka (“Little Curly”).

Having survived several harsh Russian winters, Laika was the perfect candidate for an experimental programme being run by the Soviet government. A medical scientist working for the space programme, Vladimir Yazdovsky, had launched a number of dogs to altitudes of more than 450km in pressurised rockets, and Laika was chosen to take part.

Laika: the original Soviet space dog. Image: Fair use.

While the US tested their rocket programme using monkeys, about two-thirds of whom died, dogs were chosen by the Soviet Union for their ability to withstand long periods of inactivity. Only stray female dogs were used, because it was thought they’d be better able to cope with the extreme stress of spaceflight, and the spacesuits designed for the programme were equipped with a device to collect faeces and urine that only worked with females.

The dogs were thoroughly trained before their journeys. This included standing still for long periods, wearing the spacesuits, being confined to increasingly small boxes for 15 to 20 days at a time, riding in centrifuges to simulate the high acceleration of launch and being placed in machines that simulated the vibrations and loud noises of a rocket.

The first pair of dogs to travel to space were Dezik and Tsygan (“Gypsy”), who made it to 110km on 22 July 1951 and were recovered, unharmed, the next day. Dezik returned to space in September 1951 with a dog named Lisa, but neither survived. After Dezik’s death, Tsygan was adopted by Anatoli Blagonravov, a doctor who later worked closely with the US at the height of the cold war to promote international co-operation on spaceflight.

While the Soviets used dogs, the Americans worked with monkeys. This is Baker. (Public domain)

They were followed by Smelaya (“Brave”), who defied her name by running away the day before her launch was scheduled. She was found the next morning, however, and made a successful flight with Malyshka (“Babe”). Another runaway was Bolik, who successfully escaped a few days before her flight in September 1951. Her replacement – ignominiously named ZIB , an acronym for “substitute for missing bolik” – was a street dog found running around the barracks where the tests were being conducted. Despite not being trained, he made a successful flight and returned to Earth unharmed.

In June 1954, another dog named Lisa flew to an altitude of 100km with a companion named Ryzhik (“Ginger”), returning successfully. Neither had to deal with the trauma of a mid-air ejection at an altitude of 85km, as Albina and Tsyganka (“Gypsy Girl”) did. The pair landed safely, and scientists involved noted how well Albina had coped with the journey.

In 1957, Soviet scientists were ready to attempt something rather more audacious – an orbital flight. Sputnik was launched on 4 October 1957 in a storm of publicity, sparking a crisis of sorts in the US. This triggered the space race, and led not only to the creation of NASA, the Apollo programme and the moon landings, but also a vast increase in the funding of science.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in full thaw, decided to increase the pressure on the US, so Sputnik was followed only a month later by Sputnik 2 – a mission to put a living creature into orbit. The Soviets didn’t have the time to build the technology to bring the craft back, so it was known from the start that whichever animal was chosen would perish in space.

A longlist of ten canine cosmonauts was drawn up, which was then reduced to a shortlist of three. They were Albina , who’d already ejected from 85km; a dog named Mushka (“Little Fly”); and the aforementioned Kudryavka, who had impressed her trainers with her calm, quiet demeanour in the face of simulated stresses.

This even temperament won her the honour of becoming the first animal in orbit, and she was renamed Laika (“Barker”). In the days before launch, she was kept in the module she would fly in , which was padded, had enough room for her to stand up and lie down and gave her access to a specially designed nutritious jelly that was high in fibre.

Dogs were housed in padded boxes like this for their voyage, allowing them space to stand or sit and giving them access to food // Benutzer:HPH CC BY-SA 3.0

Before launch, she was covered in an alcohol solution and painted with iodine in the places where sensors were connected to her skin to monitor her heartbeat, her blood pressure and other biological variables.

On 3 November 1957, Laika blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and became the first creature to orbit the Earth. The launch went smoothly, and her capsule entered an elliptical orbit, circling the planet at 29,000km/h and completing a full rotation every hour and 42 minutes.

While Laika certainly made it into space alive, it’s not clear how long she lived after that. It was originally announced that she had been euthanised with poisoned food several days into the mission, but this story was subsequently changed. Apparently, she had died when her oxygen supply ran out on the sixth day of her journey.

Laika on a Romanian postage stamp. Public domain

However, in October 2002, 45 years after her journey, it was revealed that Laika had most likely perished a few hours after launch from overheating and stress caused by the failure of a rocket component to separate from the capsule.

Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists who worked on the mission, said in 1998 that he regretted sending Laika to her death. “Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak,” he said. “The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it… We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.”

Nonetheless, the mission was another great success for the Soviets, and the space programme continued. One of the most travelled dogs was Otvazhnaya (“Brave One”), who accompanied a dog named Snezhinka (“Snowflake”) into sub-orbital space on 2 July 1959 before making five more successful flights that year.

On 28 July 1960, Bars (“Snow Leopard”) and Lisichka (“Little Fox”) were chosen to follow Laika into orbit, but both perished after their rocket exploded just 28 seconds into the launch sequence. This crash caused considerable uproar within the Soviet space programme, since the problem that had caused the explosion had supposedly been fixed.

Belka (“Squirrel”) and Strelka (“Arrow”) were the next successful orbiters, spending a day in space on 19 August 1960 aboard Sputnik 5, which was a veritable Noah’s Ark of animals. The craft contained Belka, Strelka, a grey rabbit, 42 mice, two rats, flies, and several plants and fungi, as well as some slightly creepy strips of human flesh.

All the animals survived the spacecraft’s return to Earth on 20 August, although telemetry showed that one of the dogs had suffered a seizure during the fourth orbit. This led directly to the decision to limit Yuri Gagarin’s legendary flight the following year to three orbits.

Strelka, one of the passengers aboard Sputnik 5. Pretenderrs, used under Creative Commons.

Strelka subsequently had six puppies with Pushok, a male dog at the research base who participated in many of the ground-based experiments but didn’t travel to space. One of the puppies was named Pushinka (“Fluffy”) and was given to US president John F Kennedy’s daughter Caroline by Khrushchev in 1961.

The dog was initially kept away from the White House by Kennedy’s staff due to fears that its body may have been implanted with microphones, but after a medical check she was brought into the home and won the heart of another of Kennedy’s dogs – a Welsh terrier named Charlie. The pair had a litter of puppies themselves, which Kennedy affectionately referred to as “pupniks”. Their descendents are still going today, and Belka and Strelka were celebrated in 2010 through an animated feature film named Space Dogs.

A model of Strelka in Australia in 1993. Bignoter CC BY-SA 3.0

On 1 December 1960, tragedy struck. Mushka – who had been shortlisted for Laika’s mission but lost out – finally made it into space aboard Sputnik 6, accompanied by Pchyolka (“Little Bee”) and other animals, plants and insects. They were in good health when the rocket began its re-entry, but a last-minute navigation error meant that the craft was heading to land outside Soviet borders. Fear of foreign agents inspecting the capsule trumped the lives of the animals aboard the spacecraft, so it was intentionally destroyed, killing everything onboard.

The CIA intercepted and decoded this image of one of the dogs aboard Sputnik 6 in December 1960

On 22 December 1960, the team tried once more. Damka (“Queen of Checkers”) and Krasavka (“Little Beauty”) were selected from the pool and prepared for launch.

Almost immediately after take-off, however, the rocket encountered difficulties. The upper-stage booster failed, causing the craft to re-enter the atmosphere after reaching a maximum altitude of 214km. The backup plan in this situation was to eject the dogs and self-destruct. However, the ejector seat failed to operate, leaving the dogs stuck in the capsule as the self-destruct sequence ticked down.

Then something incredible happened. The self-destruct module also shorted out , aborting the sequence. The capsule plummeted back to Earth, landing in deep snow in Siberia. A backup self-destruct timer had been set for 60 hours, so a team scrambled to locate the craft. They found it on the first day, but without sufficient daylight to disarm the self-destruct sequence and open the capsule. They were only able to report that the window of the capsule had frosted over in the -45C temperatures of the landing site, and that no signs of life were heard from inside.

Sputnik 3 in the Tsiolkovsky State Museum. Енин Арсений used under Creative Commons.

The next day, at dawn, they returned to the capsule, fearing the worst. As they opened the hatch, however, they heard barking – Damka and Krasavka were alive. The mice that had accompanied them on the mission were not so fortunate, though – they had frozen to death.

The dogs were immediately wrapped in sheepskin coats and flown to Moscow, where they were given the best medical care. Both survived, and Krasavka was adopted by Oleg Gazenko, a lieutenant general who had fought in the second world war and the Korean war and had supervised the space mission. Krasavka went on to have a litter of puppies and live a contented life, dying at home 14 years later.

As the Soviet spaceflight programme ramped up towards its first human launch in 1961, the dogs began to be accompanied by dummy cosmonauts. Chernushka (“Blackie”) flew on Sputnik 9 on 9 March 1961 with a dummy named Ivan Ivanovich, some mice and a guinea pig. To test the spacecraft communications, they placed a recording of a choir in Ivanovich’s chest, so that any radio stations picking up the signal would understand he wasn’t real. He was ejected at altitude and parachuted to the ground, while Chernushka was recovered unharmed from the capsule.

Zvyozdochka (“Starlet”, named by Gagarin himself) flew on Sputnik 10 on the final practice flight before Gagarin’s voyage on 25 March 1961, again accompanied by Ivanovich and his choir recording (this time augmented with a recipe for cabbage soup to confuse anyone listening in). Again, both the dummy and the dog returned safely to Earth. Ivanovich was auctioned in 1993 for $189,500, still in his spacesuit. Today, he lives in the National Air and Space museum in Washington DC.

A 1966 Soviet stamp celebrating record-breakers Ugolyok and Veterok. Public domain.

Following Gagarin’s triumphant mission on 12 April 1961, the Soviets slowly dismantled their now-redundant dogs-in-space programme. Its final flight, the Cosmos 110 mission, came five years later, on 22 February 1966. It carried two dogs – Veterok (“Light Breeze”) and Ugolyok (“Coal”), who spent a record-breaking 22 days in orbit, testing whether life could survive for longer durations in orbit. As well as Veterok and Ugolyok, it carried yeast cells, blood cells and live bacteria.

The long-duration mission was a success, and the dogs landed safely back on Earth. However, their medical checkups afterwards revealed that their muscle and bone structures had sustained damage as a result of spending such a long time in microgravity. This paved the way for later discoveries concerning the biological effects of spaceflight on the human body. Veterok and Ugolyok held the record for spaceflight duration until Skylab 2 in 1973, and they still hold the record for the longest spaceflight by dogs.

A number of other dogs flew on sub-orbital flights, including Dymka (“Smoky”), Modnitsa (“Fashionable”) and Kozyavka (“Little Gnat”), as well as at least four others whose names are unknown. Almost all survived, with the exception of two of the unnamed dogs, who perished in failed launches.

Space dogs Veterok and Ugoljok. Tekniska museet, under Creative Commons.

Without their contributions, and those of their canine colleagues, the Soviet Union would never have been able to launch Sputnik in 1957 and Gagarin in 1961, and the space race may never have taken off. Their heroism and bravery fuelled the earliest space exploration missions, paving the way for humans to later follow.

So, to Dezik and Tsygan, Smelaya, Malyshka, ZIB, Ryzhik, Albina and Tsyganka, Mushka, Otvazhnaya, and Snezhunka, Bars and Lisichka, Belka and Strelka, Pushok, Pchyolka, Damka and Krasavka, Chernushka, Zvyozdochka, Veterok and Ugolyok, Dymka, Modnitsa, Kozyavka and, most of all, Laika – thank you for everything you’ve done for mankind.

Хорошая собака – or, as we say in the west, good dog.

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Lead image: V Vizu, used under Creative Commons