Space dog Laika: 60th anniversary

[Ray Allan]

On November 3, 1957, the USSR stunned the world with a new space sensation--the launch of Sputnik-2 carrying a dog onboard. The Space Age had barely started less than a month before, with the launch of the first Soviet satellite on October 4, 1957. Sputnik-1 a 40-pound sphere, looked very heavy compared to the US spacecraft under development at the time. Now four weeks later, the Soviet press boasted about the 250-pound (508.3-kilogram) spacecraft carrying the first-ever live passenger--a dog named Laika. However, it soon became apparent that the animal would not return. The Cold War politics left no time for designers to develop a reliable life-support system, not to mention the heat shield to protect a spacecraft from a fiery reentry. Years after Sputnik 2 burned up in the atmosphere, conflicting scenarios of Laika's death were circulating in the West, along with a few misconceptions about this historic mission.

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/sputnik2.html

Soviet Space Dog, " Laika A One Way Ticket " BBC, Part. 5

Soviet Space Dog, " Laika A One Way Ticket " BBC, Part. 5

[Emily Henderson]

Originally Posted by Ray Allan

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/sputnik2.html


Soviet Space Dog, " Laika A One Way Ticket " BBC, Part. 5

Interesting, very sad. Russians are brilliant obviously--(((Bolsheviks))) cruel AF, apparently. USA Govt. is no better, we've done horrible things to animals (and people).

[Ray Allan]

Originally Posted by Emily Henderson

Interesting, very sad. Russians are brilliant obviously--(((Bolsheviks))) cruel AF, apparently. USA Govt. is no better, we've done horrible things to animals (and people).

The USSR had successfully recovered dogs and other small animals from space prior to Laika's flight, but only on short suborbital shots where the rocket was going much slower than orbital velocity of 18,000 mph, and their space capsules didn't require such thick heat shielding on reentry. Same for American rocket tests in the 1950s before Sputnik. The first animals successfully returned to Earth from orbit were two dogs, Belka and Strelka, in a prototype of the Vostok spacecraft Yuri Gagarin would fly a few months later. And the US did it with chimpanzees before their first astronauts went up. But sadly, other animals did die in other test flights. Better them than humans, of course.