Where Is Laika’s Sputnik 2 Now?

On the 3rd of November 1957, a small dog from the streets of Moscow was launched into orbit inside Sputnik 2. Her name was Laika. She was the first animal to circle the Earth. Most people know that part. And most people know she never came home. So here is the plain answer. Her spacecraft does not exist anymore. On the 14th of April 1958, Sputnik 2 fell out of orbit and burned up in the sky over the Atlantic. Laika's body was still inside it. What almost nobody asks is what happened in the five months before that. For 45 years, the official story of how she died was not true. The CIA wrote a memo asking whether there had been a dog on board at all. And when the spacecraft finally came down, one ship that saw it filed a report that ended up in the U.S. Air Force's files on unidentified objects. We'll follow Sputnik 2 to the end of its last orbit. Then, we'll find two dogs who flew after her and did come home. You can still see them today. She was not called Laika at first. In the kennels, she was Kudryavka. Curly. She was a stray, about two years old, and she weighed about six kilograms. The program only took female dogs. They were thought to cope better with a small, closed space. And it took strays on purpose. A dog that had lived through Moscow winters on the street was expected to cope with almost anything. The training was built around getting smaller. The dogs were kept in smaller and smaller cages for longer and longer periods until the cabin itself felt familiar. They were spun in a centrifuge to get used to the forces of launch, and they learned to eat a jelly, the only kind of food that would stay put without gravity. Her spacecraft was built in a hurry. The first Sputnik had gone up on the 4th of October and caught the world by surprise. The Soviet leadership wanted a second one up in time for the 40th anniversary of the revolution, on the 7th of November. Sputnik 2 launched 32 days after the first. Boris Chertok. A deputy to the chief designer, Sergei Korolev, later wrote that it was built without any preliminary design at all. Most of it was made from sketches. There was no time to build a way back down. Everyone working on it knew that. Above Laika's cabin sat the radio transmitters and two instruments for measuring radiation from the sun and from space. Ten dogs were available. Three were chosen. Laika would fly. Albina, who had already been up twice on rockets, was her backup. A third dog, Mucha, was used to test the equipment. Ten days before launch, the doctor in charge of the flying dogs, Vladimir Yazdovsky, made the choice final. Before they left for the launch site, he and a younger doctor, Oleg Gazenko, operated on the dogs. They ran cables from heart, breathing and blood pressure sensors to the transmitters. Yazdovsky later wrote that Laika was quiet and charming. Before the launch, he took her home to play with his children. Remember the name Gazenko. He comes back at the end. The launch site was at Tyuratam in Kazakhstan. Today, it's called Baikonur. Shortly before the rocket was rolled out, an engineer named Leonid Voskresensky found a fault that could have wasted the whole flight. A small circuit was meant to switch the radio on and off as the satellite went round. In testing, it switched the radio off once and never switched it back on. In orbit, that would have meant one pass of data and then silence. The man who designed the circuit, Boris Shumakov, found the problem. By then, the rocket was already standing on its erector, so he climbed up to do the rewiring himself. When he finished, he didn't take the stairs. He jumped down onto the concrete, five meters below, and couldn't walk properly for half an hour. Every heartbeat that reached the ground over the next days came through his circuit. On the 2nd of November, in the middle of the day, Laika was placed in her container. A little after 1 in the morning on the 3rd, the container was lifted to the top of the rocket. It was a cold night. Technicians ran a hose up from a ground air conditioning unit to keep her warm. One of the engineers, Yevgeny Shabarov, remembered the moment before the hatch was closed. We kissed her nose and wished her bon voyage, he said. They knew she would not survive. At half past five in the morning, Moscow time, the rocket lifted off. Sensors on Laika's body sent her heartbeat to the ground. On the way up, it reached 260 beats a minute. About three times normal. Her breathing ran four to five times faster than usual. But she survived the launch. Within five minutes, Sputnik 2 was in orbit. What happened next is in a secret note to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Its number was SK-3-2468. For the first three orbits, it says, her breathing and heartbeat were normal. On the third orbit, the sensors recorded movement. At the same time, the temperature in the cabin rose sharply to 43 degrees Celsius. That's about 109 Fahrenheit. On the second day, during the 15th, 16th, and 17th orbits, the sensors for her heartbeat, breathing, and blood pressure sent nothing. By five in the morning on the 6th of November, there was no sign of a heartbeat, And no movement. Other accounts put her death much earlier, five to seven hours after launch. Either way, by the time newspapers around the world were printing her picture, she was almost certainly dead. On the 10th of November, Sputnik 2's batteries ran out, and it fell silent. The Soviet press said she had lived for about a week. In the West, the flight got a nickname, Muttnik. It also started an argument about how animals were being treated. Inside the Soviet Union, an anonymous verse made fun of the whole mission. The science was thinner than the headlines. On the 25th of November, the leaders of the rocket industry reported to the government that more than 70,000 signals had been received, with help from 1,900 radio amateurs. But the radiation data came back in fragments. There were nine short pieces of telemetry from the solar sensor. Two or three minutes each. Soviet scientists could not put them together. A few months later, an American satellite, Explorer 1, made the first great discovery of the space age with its own instrument, the radiation belts around the Earth. Most accounts of Laika end there. For her spacecraft, there were still five months to go. With every system dead, Sputnik 2 kept circling the Earth once every 104 minutes. It had never been designed to separate from the core stage of its rocket. The satellite, the rocket, and the dog went round as one object. In Washington, nobody could be sure what was up there. On the 17th of March 1958, the CIA issued a memorandum. Its title was a question. Sputnik 2. With or without dog? The agency admitted the evidence did not allow a firm answer, but it concluded that Sputnik 2 had carried a live dog. The memo stayed secret until 2002. When it was released, one line was still blacked out, the name of a source inside the Soviet Union who could neither confirm nor deny the dog. By April, the orbit was sinking. On the night of the 14th of April, 1958, After 162 days in space, Sputnik 2 came down. By most counts, it had gone round the Earth about 2,570 times. It came in over the Atlantic, People along the east coast of the United States saw it go. The Harvard Crimson reported that volunteer satellite spotters, the Moon Watchers, followed it down. Ten minutes later, word came from Barbados of a fiery object breaking up in the sky. The same report raised a question nobody could answer yet. Parts of the satellite, it said, might still be in orbit, although there was no evidence of that. At sea in the West Indies, the crew of a cargo ship, the SS Andros Merchant, reported a brilliant cigar-shaped object. Their report went into a U.S. Air Force file kept on unidentified objects. It was a dead spacecraft with a dog inside. According to the space historian Anatoly Zak, the fiery trail ran from over New York to the Amazon in about 10 minutes. That night, Moscow announced that Sputnik 2 had disintegrated. So, where is Sputnik 2 now? Nowhere. It came apart over the Atlantic and the Caribbean. And Laika came apart with it. Some accounts say pieces reached the ground in the Amazon. No one has reported finding one. The truth about her took longer to come down. In 1998, at a press conference in Moscow, Oleg Gazenko spoke about her in public. The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it, he said. We shouldn't have done it. Then he added one more sentence. We did not learn enough from the mission, he said, to justify the death of the dog. In 2002, a Russian scientist, Dmitry Malashenkov, made the rest public. Laika had not lived for a week. She had died of overheating and panic within hours of launch. What you can see in Moscow today is a copy. The city's space museums have shown models of Sputnik 2, with a model dog in the cabin. There is nothing of the real one to put in a case. And there is the monument. On the 11th of April, 2008, The day before Russia's Cosmonautics Day, a small bronze statue was unveiled in northwest Moscow. It's about two meters tall. A rocket rises and turns into an open hand. Laika stands on the palm. It stands outside the Institute of Military Medicine, where she was prepared for her flight. At the unveiling, the head of the institute, Igor Ushakov, said he recognized her. She was looking, he said, at the building where her training had taken place. Laika was not the last dog. On the 19th of August, 1960, two more strays went into orbit in a test version of the ship that would carry Yuri Gagarin. Their names were Belka and Strelka. With them went 40 mice, two rats, and some plants. The next day, their capsule came back down. Both dogs were alive. They were the first living things to orbit the Earth and come home. At the press conference afterwards, a doctor held both dogs up for the cameras. It was Oleg Gazenko. In his memoirs, he called it the proudest moment of his life. Gazenko lived until 2007. Years after Laika, he took one of the program's dogs home for good. Her name was Krasavka. In December 1960, her rocket failed on the way to orbit, and her capsule came down in the snow in Siberia. She survived. She lived with Gazenko's family until she died, 14 years later. Strelka later had puppies. In 1961, Nikita Khrushchev sent one of them, Pushenka, to the White House as a gift for Jacqueline Kennedy. Some Americans suspected the puppy was carrying a listening device. She wasn't. Pushenka had puppies of her own, with the Kennedy's terrier, Charlie. President Kennedy called them Pupniks. When Belka and Strelka died, they were not buried. They were preserved. Today, they are at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow, a short walk from VDNKH metro station. Next to the capsule they actually flew in, the museum lists it as the genuine descent vehicle. Strelka has often been lent abroad. A museum administrator once called her their travel dog. The museum sits in the base of the Monument to the Conquerors of Space, a titanium rocket trail 107 meters high, opened in 1964. Around its base are carved figures of the people of the space program. Scientists, engineers, workers, a cosmonaut. Among them is Laika. She is the only one who isn't human. Three years apart, three dogs went into orbit from the same launch site. Two came home and became stars. Gazenko held them up to the cameras. The first dog he helped prepare never came back, and nothing of her ship is left to show. Inside the museum, the dogs who came home stand behind glass. Outside, on the monument above them, is the one who never did.