![]() But the trip aboard the thundering Jupiter-C rocket, which took them 300 miles high and nearly 2,000 miles down range, left them shaken, as the post-flight picture of Able, above, suggests. It was all harmless fun at first for Baker, a squirrel monkey, and her space travel companion, Able, a rhesus monkey, in the run-up to their 16-minute space flight on May 28, 1959. Western media covered the launch with helpful illustrations, while Eastern marketers-nominally non-capitalist-did not hesitate to cash in on the Laika brand. The rocket that lifted Laika to space was dubbed Sputnik 2, but that concealed its ominous pedigree: it was actually a modified R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile. Laika’s lace-up suit included a helmet contoured to a head with a snout, and an oxygen supply in the event of a pressure leak. (Clockwise from left): Astronauts need spacesuits and that’s true whether they’re canines or humans. Laika, the involuntary pioneer, is owed our thanks. The mutt, however, preceded the man-as well as all of the other women and men who will ever leave the Earth. More animals would follow, and just three years later, in April of 1961, so would Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space. Sometime during her fourth orbit, she died when her cabin overheated.įive months later, after 2,566 more orbits, Sputnik 2 reentered the atmosphere and was incinerated by the heat of reentry, cremating Laika in the process. As it turned out, she barely survived six hours. There was enough food and water to sustain Laika for seven days, no more. The answer was that she wouldn’t, and that she was never intended to survive it. The world worried for her too, fretting especially over whether she would survive her journey. But the world loved Laika, perhaps no one more than the members of the American press, who nicknamed her Muttnik. reacted with equal parts indignation, outrage and fear. Less than a month earlier, when the Soviets shocked the world with the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, the U.S. It was 60 years ago, on November 3, 1957, that Laika-an 11-lb., part-terrier mongrel, picked up on the streets of Moscow-began providing answers, when the Soviet Union launched her into orbit aboard Sputnik 2. Human beings had visions of traveling above the atmosphere and out toward the moon and planets, but the survivability of such an enterprise was very much an open question. The same is true of the first animals in space. That doesn’t diminish their profound contribution to scientific knowledge-indeed, it enlarges it. Those soldiers hardly volunteered for the misison: The thousands of monkeys and mice that were used as test subjects for Jonas Salk’s first polio vaccine were conscripted for the job, whether they wanted to do it or not. Animals were every bit as heroic as the first human astronautsĪnimals have long been the science community’s shock troops-the first to hit the beaches when a new frontier of knowledge is being claimed.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |