Initially “nothing seemed to be going wrong,” Kotovskaya said. ”Of course, during blast-off, Laika’s heart beat speeded up a lot.”īut after three hours, her heart beat was back to normal. “Now it was time to send one into space,” says Kotovskaya, who turned 90 in October but still heads a laboratory at Moscow’s Institute of Biomedical Problems.
Kotovskaya recalls that before Laika, several dogs had been blasted up into suborbital space for brief periods of a few minutes “to check that it was possible to survive in weightlessness.” In a well-timed propaganda effort, it fell just before the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on 7 November. “Those nine orbits of Earth made Laika the world’s first cosmonaut - sacrificed for the sake of the success of future space missions,” says Kotovskaya, who remains proud of her pioneering work as a scientist training Laika and other early space animals.įor Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Laika’s voyage was yet another space feat to discomfit the Americans. It followed the first ever Sputnik satellite launch earlier that year.īut things did not go exactly to plan and the dog was only able to survive for a few hours, flying around the Earth nine times. The Soviet Union sent Laika up to space in a satellite on 3 November, 1957 - sixty years ago.
The former street dog was about to make history as the first living creature to orbit the earth, blasting off on a one-way journey. “I ASKED HER to forgive us and I even cried as I stroked her for the last time,” says 90-year-old Russian biologist Adilya Kotovskaya, recalling the day she bid farewell to her charge Laika.
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