Laika wasn't the first dog in space; the 1951 dogs came home

Laika was not the first dog in space. Soviet R-1 rockets were carrying pairs of dogs to about 100 kilometres and returning them by parachute in 1951, six years before she rode Sputnik 2 into orbit on November 3, 1957. Her firsts were orbit, and a flight with no way home.

Who were the first dogs in space?

NASA’s history credits Dezik and Tsygan (“Gypsy”), launched in the summer of 1951, as the first canine suborbital astronauts. Between 1951 and 1952 the R-1 series carried nine dogs, three of them twice. Dezik died on his second trip that September. When a dog named Bobik escaped before another launch, a stray found near the canteen was renamed ZIB, the Russian acronym for “substitute for missing dog Bobik”, and flew.

So the common claim that Belka and Strelka in 1960 were the first dogs to return alive from space is wrong. They were the first back from orbit.

Was Laika’s flight really improvised in a month?

Only partly. Her cabin was adapted from the recoverable containers used on those rocket flights, and preliminary plans to orbit a dog had been drafted at least a year earlier, according to space historian Anatoly Zak. What was rushed was the schedule, aimed at the November anniversary of the revolution, leaving no time to design a way back.

Nor did she die painlessly about a week into the flight, as had long been said. In 2002, Dimitri Malashenkov of Moscow’s Institute of Biological Problems told the World Space Congress that telemetry showed heat and humidity rising after launch, that lifesigns stopped five to seven hours into the flight, and that she had died of overheating and stress by the fourth orbit. Earlier accounts had her surviving at least four days.

Washington even doubted she had flown. A CIA memorandum of March 17, 1958, titled “SPUTNIK II, With or Without Dog?”, said the evidence did not permit a positive determination that it carried an animal, though officials believed it did. More on her flight is in Laika’s story as the first animal in orbit.