Laika was a hero

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The New Yorker @NewYorker 13m
After the Sputnik 2 mission, Laika was seen as a hero. But there was a dark lie at the core of her story.

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Remembering Laika, Space Dog and Soviet Hero

In the evening of November 3, 1957, barely a month after the Soviet Union sent humanity’s first artificial satellite into orbit, a rocket lifted off from a secret site in Kazakhstan, carrying its second. The launch of Sputnik 2 was timed to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, and the craft itself was an appropriately showy statement of Communist know-how—six times heavier than Sputnik 1, designed to fly nearly twice as high, and, most impressive of all, containing a live passenger. A week before the mission began, Moscow Radio had broadcast an interview with the cosmonaut in question, described as “a small, shaggy dog.” Western newspapers, however, were initially confused about what to call her. Introduced as Kudryavka (“Little Curly”), she was also known as Limonchik (“Little Lemon”) and Damka (“Little Lady”). A Soviet spokesman eventually clarified that her name was Laika (“Barker”), which did nothing to stop a columnist at Newsday from referring to her exclusively as “Muttnik.”

...soon animal lovers chimed in on poor Laika’s behalf. She was “the shaggiest, lonesomest, saddest dog in all history,” the Times’s editorial board lamented; to subject her to such an experiment was “monstrous” and “horrible.” An employee of an animal shelter noted Laika’s inability to consent to the flight, calling it “morally, spiritually, and ethically wrong.” Early articles in the American press speculated that the Russians were likely to try to bring her back alive, and the director of the Moscow Institute of Astronomy seemed to confirm that this was true. Ultimately, though, the Soviets admitted that Laika would never again set foot on Earth. After a week in orbit, the Los Angeles Times reported, she would be fed poisoned food, “in order to keep her from suffering a slow agony.” When the moment came, Russian scientists reassured the public that Laika had been comfortable, if stressed, for much of her flight, that she had died painlessly, and that she had made invaluable contributions to space science.

Within the Soviet Union, Laika and her comrades were seen as heroes. What’s more, they were heroes that Communists could safely commodify. As Olesya Turkina writes in “Soviet Space Dogs,” a book lavishly illustrated with kitschy canine-cosmonaut imagery, “Under socialism the niche occupied by popular culture in capitalist society was subject to strict ideological control.” Because the Kremlin considered the dogs ideologically safe, Turkina continues, they effectively “became the first Soviet pop stars,” appearing on every product imaginable—matchboxes, razor blades, postcards, stamps, chocolates, cigarettes. Later space dogs, such as the famous Belka and Strelka, were brought back down alive, and their puppies were used as international good-will ambassadors. (One, named Pushinka, was given to John F. Kennedy.) The animals were so well loved, in fact, that when Yuri Gargarin achieved orbit, in 1961, he is said to have remarked, “Am I the first human in space, or the last dog?” (As it happens, Gagarin was the first man, but the second primate. Earlier that year, NASA had sent up a chimpanzee it called Ham, though his original name was Chop-Chop Chang. Many other animals followed—rats, mice, frogs, fish, salamanders, even tortoises. The first extraterrestrial spider web was spun in 1973.)

But the story of Laika had a dark lie at its core. In 2002, forty-five years after the fact, Russian scientists revealed that she had died, probably in agony, after only a few hours in orbit. In the rush to put another satellite into space, the Soviet engineers had not had time to test Sputnik 2’s cooling system properly; the capsule had overheated. It remained in orbit for five months with Laika inside, then plunged into the atmosphere and burned up over the Caribbean, a space coffin turned shooting star. Turkina quotes one of the scientists assigned to Laika’s program: “The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.”


read more: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/remembering-laika-space-dog-and-soviet-hero /

[Celerity]

1. Mitt liv som hund

My Life as a Dog

the main character (a young Swedish boy in the late 1950s) identifies strongly with Laika

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Life_as_a_Dog



Swedish drama film which was released to cinemas in Sweden on 12 December 1985, directed by Lasse Hallström. It is based on the second novel of a semi-autobiographical trilogy by Reidar Jönsson. It tells the coming-of-age story of Ingemar, a young boy sent to live with relatives. The cast includes Anton Glanzelius, Melinda Kinnaman, and Tomas von Brömssen.

In 1987, the film was released in the United States where it became a surprise hit. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards that year in the categories of Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

[BradAllison]

4. Mitt Romney's Dog?

He got similar treatment......

[Celerity]

8. mitt is the neutral singular possessive Swedish word for 'my' (min is the gendered possessive) mina

is the plural possessive for either form.

[róisín_dubh]

2. Ugh, I remember the first time I read this and how sad I was.

I was just listening to Ben Rhodes on Pod Save the World and he discussed how his daughters asked him about this and how he struggled to answer.

[panader0]

3. I was 10 or 11 when Gargarin went to space.

I thought it was very cool and named my pet mouse Yuri, much to my career Air Force father's
dismay. I can't remember what ever happened to Yuri.

[hlthe2b]

5. No other species can be as monstrous as humans..

There is only so much human cruelty I can handle reading about on a daily basis. This exceeds my ability for today.

[Rhiannon12866]

6. When I was in Moscow, we visited the Exhibition for Economic Achievement

It's similar to a permanent World's Fair with numerous exhibitions and we only had time to see a couple of them, so we went to the space exhibition. There were numerous models and spacecraft displays, and one was a model of Laika's capsule - including a model of the dog. We had a guide, a young woman who told us about the various missions, including the first cosmonauts who had to be carried out of their capsules since they had lost the use of their muscles after so long in space. I felt anxious, Laika's story disturbed me especially, and I had to go outside for some air. Our young female guide didn't understand.

[Cartoonist]

7. Sad mission