She weighed about eleven pounds and had been living on the streets of Moscow. On November 3, 1957, she was strapped into a pressurized capsule roughly the size of a washing machine, bolted to a converted ballistic missile and launched into orbit. Her name was Laika. She was the first living creature to circle the planet, and everyone who built the spacecraft knew before launch that she was never coming home. There was no heat shield, no parachute and no re-entry system, because in 1957 that technology didn’t exist.
Why a stray?
Soviet scientists deliberately preferred strays: a dog that had survived a Moscow winter would handle cold, hunger and stress better than a pet. They wanted small females, because a female didn’t need to lift a leg in a capsule where she couldn’t turn around.
Handlers called her Kudryavka, Little Curly. The name that stuck, Laika, is Russian for “Barker.” NASA’s records describe her as a part-Samoyed terrier, two or three years old; the American press nicknamed her Muttnik.
A launch built for a holiday
Sputnik 1 reached orbit on October 4, 1957, and the global reaction stunned Soviet leadership. Nikita Khrushchev wanted a second launch timed to November 7, the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. That gave engineers about four weeks to build a cabin to keep a mammal alive, working without finished blueprints.
Training
Three dogs were prepared: Albina, Mushka and Laika, under Vladimir Yazdovsky and Oleg Gazenko. The dogs were kept in progressively smaller cages for up to twenty days, until they stopped urinating and defecating entirely. They were spun in centrifuges and exposed to recorded rocket noise, which doubled their pulse rates. Sensors were surgically implanted to transmit breathing, pulse and blood pressure.
Ten days before launch, Yazdovsky took Laika home to play with his children. He later wrote that he wanted to do something nice for her because she had so little time left.
The flight
On October 31, 1957, she was sealed into the capsule at Baikonur, three days before launch. Engineer Yevgeniy Shabarov later said the team kissed her nose and wished her a good voyage, knowing she wouldn’t survive.
- Her heart rate was 103 beats per minute on the pad and hit 240 during acceleration.
- The rocket’s core stage failed to detach, crippling the thermal control system. Insulation tore loose and the cabin climbed past 104°F.
- Somewhere in the fourth orbit, five to seven hours after launch, the sensors went silent.
The cover story
For days afterward, Radio Moscow reported that the dog in orbit was calm and eating well. In Britain, the National Canine Defence League asked owners to observe a minute’s silence for each day Laika remained in space. Demonstrators gathered with their dogs outside the United Nations in New York. None of them knew she was already dead.
The truth stayed buried for 45 years. In October 2002, at the World Space Congress in Houston, Dimitri Malashenkov presented telemetry showing she died of overheating and stress within hours. Back in 1998, Oleg Gazenko had already said they shouldn’t have done it, and that they didn’t learn enough to justify the death of the dog.
What her flight proved
It showed a mammal could survive a rocket launch and function in weightlessness, which wasn’t obvious in 1957. On August 19, 1960, Belka and Strelka orbited seventeen times and came back alive, in a capsule essentially identical to the one that carried Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961.
Her monument
Laika didn’t get a monument of her own in Moscow until April 11, 2008, outside the Institute of Military Medicine where she trained. It’s a rocket that opens into a human hand, and standing on the palm, life-size, is a small stray dog.
