'An icon of Soviet space exploration': The Russian stray dog that beat humans into orbit

In November 1957, Soviet scientists sent Laika on a one-way voyage, making her a tragic national hero. Sixty years on, one scientist's son told the BBC about playing with her as a boy.

A lesser-known aspect of the Cold War space race involved Soviet scientists scouring the streets of Moscow for stray mongrels. Before the earliest human spaceflights, female canines were trained to undertake the highly dangerous journey – and on 3 November 1957, a dog called Laika was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, becoming the first ever living creature to orbit the Earth.

Sadly, though, Laika did not survive her voyage. The tragic part of her story is that the Soviets knew all along that hers would be a one-way trip. "Scientists then did not know how to return living creatures from orbit back to Earth," Prof Viktor Yazdovsky told the BBC's Witness History in 2017. "Everyone was very concerned for Laika. They knew that she would not return from her journey."

Yazdovsky's father Vladimir had been in charge of the medical side of the Soviet space programme, and Viktor recalled playing with Laika as a nine-year-old child shortly before her launch. "She was a very patient dog, very affectionate. She was easy to train. She was considered very clever. She had very expressive dark eyes… My father brought her to my granny's house, not far from Moscow, and my sisters and I played with her. Dad thought that she needed this experience of being at home before the flight."

After the successful Sputnik I launch on 4 October 1957, which sent the world's first man-made satellite into orbit, Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev had ordered the new mission. "He said: 'We didn't believe you could launch a satellite before the Americans – but you did it,'" engineer Georgi Grechko, who worked on the launch team for Sputnik I and II, told the BBC in 2019. "'Now,' [Khruschev] said, and this was mid-October, 'For the anniversary of the revolution on 7 November, I want you to launch something new.'"

According to Yazdovsky, "That's why not everything could be thought through in this flight preparation." To coincide with the 40th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Khruschev had given his scientists – headed up by chief designer Sergei Korolev – just a few weeks to follow up Sputnik I.

Handily, the task dovetailed with Korolev's personal aims. Known as the founding father of the Soviet space programme, after World War Two he had reverse-engineered the Nazis' V2 rockets to create a Soviet version capable of launching their own atomic bombs, which were much heavier than the US devices. His R7 Semyorka rocket had achieved a successful launch in August 1957, becoming the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile. But Korolev had long harboured ambitions for something else entirely.

Ever since he'd started building rockets in the 1930s, he'd hoped they would go into space, as his daughter told the BBC in 2019. "From childhood my father wanted to conquer the skies. He dreamt of becoming a pilot. He built gliders and an airplane. Then after that he began to design rockets," said Prof Natalya Koroleva. "It was a burning passion throughout his life to design rockets and fly them. He wrote: 'From now on I have one aim in life – to reach the stars.'"

So while the R7 was now capable of launching Soviet nuclear weapons to target their enemies, for Korolev it served another purpose. By sending Sputnik (or "fellow traveller" in Russian) into orbit, he could be the first person to prove that space travel was possible.

Within the month, he would launch another satellite – one that would carry a passenger. "Even today, with all our progress, and computers everywhere, I don't think that anyone could launch a new satellite in a month – but under Korolev's leadership, that's what we did," said Grechko.

Between 1951 and 1965, the Soviets sent more than 50 dogs into space, with the flights before Laika being sub-orbital. "I remember that very often a car would arrive from my father's lab… The door would open, and a crowd of dogs would tumble out of it, barking, wagging their tails," Yazdovsky told the BBC. "They would rush into the clearing in the wood near the house. They would run to us, start licking us. Then they were fed, and then a command was given. They were well trained, and they went back to the car and were driven back to the labs."

By choosing dogs for their flights, the Soviets differed from American scientists, who had sent first fruit flies and then monkeys into space. "It was clear that when monkeys had been launched up in rockets, there were frequent failures. Some had heart attacks. If they were launched under anaesthetic, the information that was sent back to Earth would be incomplete and distorted," said Yazdovsky. "If they were to send smaller animals, like mice or rats, how could you apply what you learned to humans and future human flight into space?"

There was another reason for the Soviets' canine preference, he recalled. "The physiology of dogs was very well known to Soviet scientists – the great Russian scientist Pavlov studied the circulation system of dogs, the digestion and higher nervous activity of dogs. He received a Nobel Prize for this research."

And Soviet scientists deliberately chose stray dogs. "They decided to train not pedigree dogs, but street dogs for the space programme. The strongest survived. They were homeless. Why were they selected? Because they had stamina and were undemanding. They were naturally selected by their life on the streets." 

Females were picked because they were more compliant, and to fit into the spacecraft, they needed to weigh no more than 6-7kg. As part of their preparations for flight, the mongrels lived in tiny pressurised capsules for days and weeks before launch, with doctors checking how they responded to different sounds, changing air pressure and weightlessness.

After placid Kudryavka (Little Curly) was introduced to the public via radio, she barked, becoming known as Laika, "barker" in Russian. "Everyone treated her as a hero," said Yazdovsky.

But the scientists were in a rush, working hastily to amend their plans for Sputnik I to include a pressurised compartment for the dog. "The system of thermal insulation of [Laika's] capsule had not been properly developed," recalled Yazdovsky. "She died because of the very high temperature in her capsule."

Reports about her fate were mixed at the time, with one from the BBC claiming: "It is believed the Russians are planning to catapult the dog back to Earth, although there has been no official announcement confirming this."

For many years, the Russians claimed that Laika survived in orbit for several days. But in 2002, they admitted that the climate controls had failed, and she died of overheating and stress just five to seven hours into the flight. According to declassified printouts held by the US National Air and Space Museum showing Laika's respiration during the flight, she reached orbit alive, circling the Earth in about 103 minutes. 

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The decision to send her to her death sparked international outrage at the time, with animal welfare groups in Britain picketing the Soviet embassy and calling on dog owners across the nation to observe a minute's silence to honour her. Dog lovers marched with their pets outside the UN building in New York, and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals sent a letter of protest to the Soviets via the US State Department. 

The backlash changed how space programmes handled animal subjects, with subsequent missions engineered with recovery systems to return animals safely to Earth. Almost three years after Laika's fatal mission, two more dogs were launched into space by the Soviets – and they survived. On 19 August 1960, Belka and Strelka completed 17 orbits around the Earth before landing the following day.

But as the first dog in orbit, Laika became an icon of early Soviet space exploration. Commemorative stamps and envelopes were produced bearing her image, and there were Soviet cigarettes and matches called Laika. A 2m-high monument unveiled in Moscow in 2008 shows a rocket that becomes a hand, with a dog standing in its palm.

As Yazdovsky argued, her sacrifice heralded a new era. "Laika's flight showed that a living creature could be alive in conditions of weightlessness, and the door was opened for man's travel into space."

But not everyone agreed. In 1998, Oleg Gazenko, who led the Soviet programme to train dogs in space and selected and trained Laika, told a press conference: "Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us… The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it… We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog."

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