For many years, the Soviet Union said that Laika He had died without pain. The first creature to orbit the Earth, this dog from the streets of Moscow, was launched in 1957, in the middle of the space race. Time after, just in 2002, all the suffering he experienced during the hours he was flying would be known.
It weighed about 6 kilograms and initially its name was Kudrayavka. Laika, in Russian, means Barker, and so it stayed.
The Soviets sought to better understand what the launch of a ship, microgravity and other aspects could generate in human beings. They were not the only ones to use animals, the Americans did too, but Russian secrecy caused many data to be distorted over time.
One of them was knowing what had happened to Laika’s body. For many years, the Soviet aerospace authorities said that the dog died without suffering.
But the reality was different.
Laika into space and the lies of the Soviets
Laika could sit and lie down in the cabin, always strapped in with a harness and a set of electrodes. She had access to food and water in gelatinized form.
Lie number one: the satellite would never return to Earth. The Soviet space program knew that it was a suicide mission, because Sputnik 2 was not designed for its return. Obviously they didn’t report it that way.
Lie number two: painless death. Laika suffered a lot, between the stress of the launch, the agitation, the overheating of the ship and suffocation, all for six or seven hours, until her death.
The inert body of the Soviet dog was circling the Earth for more than 2,370 orbits, 162 days in total, according to Anatoly Zak, from the Russian Space Web portal, quoted by Space. Sputnik 2’s batteries died on November 10, 1957, with the spacecraft ceasing to send data to the Control Center.
Sputnik would re-enter Earth, supposedly falling over the Amazon, with the charred remains of Laika inside.
“We Russians love dogs,” said a Soviet official
Time account that the London Daily Mirror wrote: “The dog will die, we can’t save it”, in an article about Laika. The Soviet embassy in the English capital sent a complaint, and an official noted: “We Russians love dogs. This has been done not for the sake of cruelty, but for the benefit of humanity.”
By April 12, 1961, Yuri gagarin he would become the first man to reach space.
The sacrifice of Laika (in total they sent 36 dogs throughout the stage, surviving some like Belka and Strelka, others dying) had left lessons for the Soviet space program, leading to positive experiences for human beings.
But at a huge cost to the animals.