She Was The First Dog Launched Into Space, With Only One Meal And A Seven-Day Oxygen Supply
On November 3, 1957, the Soviet Union launched a dog named Laika into space. She rode aboard the Sputnik 2 with only one meal and a seven-day oxygen supply.
She made history as the first living creature to orbit the Earth. Sadly, she died during the space mission after the Soviet rocket she was on crashed into the Earth’s atmosphere.
Laika was a stray black-and-white husky-spitz mix originally named Kudrayavka, or Little Curly. She was renamed Laika, which means Barker, when she barked during a radio interview. According to NASA, she weighed about 13 pounds at the time of her flight.
Soviet rocket scientists had wanted to send dogs into space to learn more about what launch, microgravity, and other aspects of spaceflight would do to the human body.
So, they rounded up stray dogs from the streets of Moscow. They picked the most obedient and most tolerant dogs from the group. Then, they conducted test runs in small capsules to narrow down the final candidates, and Laika was chosen.
Sputnik 2 was launched just a month after Sputnik 1, which took off on October 4, 1957. The Sputnik 2 project was rushed after Premier Nikita Khrushchev requested that it coincide with the 40th anniversary of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, which eventually led to the Soviet Union.
Teams of engineers worked quickly to build a ship that included a pressurized compartment, equipped with a video camera, for a dog. The ship weighed 1,120 pounds, six times as heavy as Sputnik 1.
They believed it could be kept within weight limits by providing its passenger with only one meal. The spacecraft also carried instruments to measure solar radiation and cosmic rays. It was not designed to return safely to Earth, so Laika was essentially sent to her death.
The engineers expected Laika to die quickly and painlessly from a lack of oxygen after spending seven days in space. The ship lifted off on November 3, with data showing that Laika survived the initial launch. She circled the Earth in about 103 minutes.
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Unfortunately, the loss of the heat shield caused the temperature in the capsule to skyrocket. She died soon after launch. The Sputnik 2 continued to orbit for five months.
“The temperature inside the spacecraft after the fourth orbit registered over 90 degrees,” said Cathleen Lewis, the curator of international space programs and spacesuits at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. “There’s really no expectation that she made it beyond an orbit or two after that.”
Soviet publications claimed that the dog had died after a week in Earth orbit, and official documents were falsified. Decades later, several Russian sources revealed that Laika died when the capsule overheated just hours into the mission.
Between 1951 and 1966, the Soviet Union launched dogs into space 71 times, resulting in 17 deaths. In every case except Laika’s, there has been hope for the animal’s survival. Since her death, Laika’s story has spread as the space dog who sacrificed her life for her country.
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