Laika, with text by Leah Hager Cohen
Laika, with text by Leah Hager Cohen (2024)
When I was a child I was fascinated with astronauts, I guess nothing unusual for a boy growing up in the sixties. So I would absorb anything that had to do with them and I discovered that the Soviets actually called their spacemen (they were all men then) "cosmonauts'', which I thought sounded better.
And then! I discovered that before the Soviets felt secure enough (but still wanting to beat the Americans to it) to send into space their first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, they had experimented with dogs, and that the first dog they sent to space was Laika, a street dog from Moscow. The Soviet Space Dogs were all stray street dogs from Moscow. Small in size to fit the capsule, their teeth pulled out so they wouldn't bite their tongues in space, their food being chewed up and mouth fed by the scientists who experimented on them. One day they were roaming the streets of the city for food, the next day they were in the lab, flying in artificially created zero gravity, and the next day out there in the universe, and Laika (her name is derived from "bark" in Russian), I think, was the first ever earthling in space. She died in space, ‘for our sake '' ('our' being the human capacity to go into space, or Soviet glory, or both).
At the time the Soviets told everyone that she died peacefully after five to seven days in space, euthanized as her oxygen supply would dwindle. A great contemporary myth was born. I think only in 2002, 45 years after her death, one of the scientists in the program revealed that she had burned to death only about five to seven hours after the launch. The scientists apparently needed about an extra month to develop a method of peaceful death for Laika, but Nikita Khrushchev (the Soviet leader at the time) was adamant that the launch had to happen on October 17, 1957, on the 40th anniversary of the revolution. Other dogs went to space after Laika, and came back alive.
The Soviet Space Dogs were big heroes in Argentina, where I grew up, and in many other places in the world. If you were a stamp collector in Argentina, as I was when I was a boy, you had a Laika stamp in your collection. To give you an idea of how impactful the Soviet Space Dogs were in the imagination of a child far away from Moscow, just think of Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut mentioned above. He said "I don't know if I am the first man or the last dog in space". That line alone is worth an opera.