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This Day in History — Laika, the First Animal to Orbit Earth

On this day in 1957

On November 3, 1957, a Moscow stray named Laika became the first animal in orbit aboard Sputnik 2, a spacecraft built with no way to bring her home.

The Off-Key Bard stands beside a Soviet launch pad on the morning of November 3, 1957. A towering R-7 rocket rises above the pad. Inside the spacecraft at its top sits an unlikely passenger. She is small, somewhere between eleven and thirteen pounds depending on the source, and she was once a stray on the streets of Moscow. Her name is Laika. She has no understanding of the journey ahead. The people who prepared her do.

"She is about to become the first animal to orbit Earth. But this spacecraft has no way to bring her home."

On November 3, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2 with a small dog named Laika aboard. She became the first animal to orbit Earth. Her flight showed that a living mammal could survive a rocket launch and the first hours of weightlessness. It was also a one-way trip. Sputnik 2 had no reentry system and no means of recovery, and Laika's death was certain from the moment the rocket left the pad.

A Month After Sputnik

The Soviet Union had launched Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957. It was a polished metal sphere about 58 centimeters across, weighing 83.6 kilograms (184 pounds), with a one-watt radio transmitter whose beeps amateur radio operators picked up around the world. The launch surprised the American public and shook the belief that the United States led the world in technology. Privately, the CIA and President Eisenhower already knew of Soviet progress from spy-plane imagery, and Eisenhower's initial response was low-key. The alarm grew anyway. The United States created ARPA in February 1958, backed the creation of NASA, passed the National Defense Education Act, and launched Explorer 1 on January 31, 1958.

Soviet leaders wanted a second triumph, and they wanted it fast. According to the Sputnik 2 record, Nikita Khrushchev asked for another launch right after Sputnik 1 flew. He stressed the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in early November as a deadline. Engineers had roughly three weeks. Chief designer Sergei Korolev likely proposed carrying a dog.

Animals Before Laika

Animals had flown above the atmosphere before. On February 20, 1947, American researchers launched fruit flies on a V-2 rocket from White Sands, New Mexico. The rocket reached about 109 kilometers in 190 seconds, and the flies parachuted back alive. On June 14, 1949, a rhesus monkey named Albert II reached about 134 kilometers, but he died on impact when his parachute failed. On July 22, 1951, the Soviet dogs Tsygan and Dezik flew a suborbital flight and were recovered alive. They were the first higher organisms to be recovered from spaceflight. Dezik died on a later flight.

But none of these animals had orbited. An orbit is a different problem. The craft has to be moving sideways so fast that it keeps falling around the planet instead of toward it, and the animal has to live in that environment for hours rather than minutes.

Choosing Laika

Soviet scientists chose stray dogs because they assumed such animals had already learned to endure cold and hunger. Laika was a mixed-breed female found on the streets of Moscow, about three years old. Sources give her weight as about 5 kilograms (11 pounds) or about 6 kilograms (13 pounds). Several names were used for her in the program, including Kudryavka ("Little Curly"), and the American press would soon call her "Muttnik." Laika, the name that stuck, means "Barker."

She was not the only candidate. Albina, who had already flown twice on a high-altitude test rocket, was the backup. Albina had recently had pups, which is why she was not the primary dog. Mushka stayed on the ground as a control, used to test instruments and life support. Laika was named the primary flight dog about ten days before launch.

Training was hard. The dogs were kept in progressively smaller cages for up to twenty days so they would tolerate the cramped cabin. They rode centrifuges that simulated launch acceleration and were exposed to machines that reproduced spacecraft noise. Their pulses doubled and their blood pressure rose. They were taught to eat a high-nutrition gel.

The Cabin

Laika's cabin had an oxygen generator, carbon dioxide absorbers, a fan that switched on when the temperature passed 15 °C (59 °F), food for a seven-day flight and a waste bag. A harness and chains let her stand, sit or lie down, but she could not turn around. Sensors tracked her electrocardiogram, respiration, arterial pressure and movement.

There was no plan to bring her back. NASA's account puts it plainly: "Due to the lack of adequate development time, no provisions were made to recover Laika." Sputnik 2 would stay up until its orbit decayed.

Launch

Sputnik 2 lifted off at 02:30:42 UTC on November 3, 1957, atop a modified R-7 from the same pad that had launched Sputnik 1 in what is now the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Its mass was about 508 kilograms (1,121 pounds), more than six times that of Sputnik 1. It entered an elliptical orbit with a low point near 212 kilometers, a high point near 1,659 kilometers and a period of about 103.7 minutes.

Laika's heart rate was 103 beats per minute before launch and rose to 240 during the early acceleration. In orbit the telemetry showed her agitated but eating. After about three hours of weightlessness her pulse had settled to about 102, which took roughly three times longer than it had in ground tests. She had survived the launch and the start of weightlessness.

What Went Wrong

The nose cone separated as planned. Sputnik 2 did not separate from its Blok A final stage. Thermal insulation tore loose, the thermal control system did not work properly, and the temperature in her cabin rose to about 40 °C (104 °F). Malashenkov later said that in such a short time it was "practically impossible to create a reliable temperature control system."

In October 2002, Russian scientist Dimitri Malashenkov revealed that Laika had died from overheating rather than surviving for the week initially reported by Soviet authorities. The spacecraft's thermal control problems caused temperatures inside her cabin to rise dangerously. Accounts based on later disclosures generally place her death within the first several hours of flight, often around five to seven hours after launch. However, previously classified Soviet reports show that the received telemetry was incomplete, making it difficult to establish the precise moment she died. What is clear is that Laika did not survive the mission for anything close to the duration originally claimed.

For decades the public was told something else, and even that story changed. Soviet publications initially claimed she died painlessly after about a week in orbit. Britannica describes accounts in which she lived six or seven days and was then put down with poisoned food before her oxygen ran out. Other Soviet statements blamed asphyxia when the batteries failed, and some Russian sources in 1999 said the cabin overheated on the fourth day. NASA's own account is cautious: "it is likely that Laika only survived for a few hours after reaching orbit."

After Laika

The spacecraft kept circling Earth long after Laika died. NASA reports that Sputnik 2's batteries expired on November 10, 1957, ending the transmission of scientific data. On April 14, 1958, after approximately 162 days in orbit, the spacecraft reentered Earth's atmosphere and disintegrated. Published accounts differ on the total number of completed orbits, with figures of approximately 2,370 and 2,570 appearing in historical summaries. Regardless of the precise count, Sputnik 2 had continued orbiting for more than five months after its passenger's death. Laika's body was never recovered.

The reaction was immediate and mixed. Many people celebrated the achievement. Animal-welfare groups were outraged, and one British group called for a minute's silence for each day she was believed to have spent in space. The American press had its joke, "Muttnik," which reflected fascination, rivalry and discomfort. In the United States, the launch also pushed officials toward action. Robert Gilruth, who later directed NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center, said that seeing the launch convinced him the United States "better get going."

The Question of Cost

Was the knowledge worth her life? Oleg Gazenko, the Soviet scientist who directed the Institute of Biomedical Problems and who selected and trained Laika, answered the question himself in 1998. "Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us," he said. "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."

That judgment deserves to be taken seriously, and it should not be overstated in the other direction. Laika's flight gave researchers a few hours of data on a mammal in the stress of launch and the onset of weightlessness. It did not show that a living passenger could survive a long flight, and it did not show that one could come home.

From Laika to Gagarin

The next step was recovery. On August 19, 1960, the Soviet Union launched the spacecraft known as Korabl-Sputnik 2, or Sputnik 5, with the dogs Belka and Strelka and other animals aboard. It was the first spaceflight to carry animals into orbit and return them safely to Earth. They landed about a day later. Nearly three years had passed since Laika's flight. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin flew one orbit aboard Vostok 1, a flight of 108 minutes. By then at least ten other dogs had been launched into orbit.

Remembering Laika

Laika became a cultural icon. She appeared on stamps and souvenirs and in the names of bands, and a NASA soil target on Mars carries her name. On April 11, 2008, Russian officials unveiled a monument to her near the military research facility in Moscow that prepared her flight. It shows a dog standing on top of a rocket.

A little dog beneath the stars,
Was carried far beyond our shores.
The world looked up to watch her fly—
And wished she'd come back from the sky.

The story of November 3, 1957, is often told as another win in the Space Race, and in engineering terms it was one. The Soviet Union put a living animal into orbit only thirty days after launching the first artificial satellite. But Laika cannot be remembered as a simple celebration. She was a stray selected for an experiment she could not understand, in a spacecraft that had no way to bring her home, and a failure in its thermal control probably ended her life within hours.

Her story endures because it holds both halves of early spaceflight. It shows how fast a handful of engineers could move, and it shows what the haste cost the animal at the center of it. Being able to do something is not the same as having a reason to do it. Laika's flight is a reminder to ask the second question as well as the first.

Sources

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