Laika, the Pioneering Space Dog, Was Launched 60 Years Ago Today (space.com)

sqorbit writes: Sixty years ago, the space race was in full swing. Russia had sent Sputnik into space with much success. In an effort to push farther, they rushed sending a dog into space in a re-purposed Sputnik rocket. The mission launched with no clear solution to a safe re-entry. Within a few hours of launch, temperature controls failed, killing the female dog named Laika. Launched on November 3, 1957, it did not re-enter the earth's atmosphere until April 14, 1958. Laika was the first living creature to fly into orbit, Space.com reports. While Soviet publications at the time claimed that Laika died, painlessly, after a week in Earth's orbit, Anatoly Zak of RussianSpaceWeb.com writes that several Russian sources revealed decades later that the dog actually survived in orbit for four days and then died when the cabin overheated. "According to other sources, severe overheating and the death of the dog occurred only five or six hours into the mission," he writes. "With all systems dead, the spacecraft continued circling the Earth until April 14, 1958, when it re-entered the atmosphere after 2,570 orbits (2,370 orbits according to other sources) or 162 days in space. Many people reportedly saw a fiery trail of Sputnik 2 as it flew over New York and reached the Amazon region in just 10 minutes during its re-entry."

Comments

Obligatory

[sheramil]

http://achewood.com/index.php?date=03282008

Re:Ahem

[pjt33]

Don't forget the first rule of Slashdot editing: don't. Even if the summary doesn't make sense without the context of the article it is ripped from (it makes a nice change here that the submitter actually wrote their own summary), editing it to make sense is verboten.

Re:Poor dog.

[PopeRatface]

The scientists involved have said they regretted sending her up, They should have sent up a less sympathetic creature. Maybe a lawyer, or something like that.

Re:Indeed...

[Hognoxious]

You can get a special comb. Or a collar impregnated with chemicals.

Re:Poor dog.

[Hognoxious]

For all their faults, this would never have happened in North Korea.

Ready for launch? I thought you said lunch!

North Korea should launch a dog into space

[maroberts]

..and time the landing for lunchtime.

Re:She didn't die, she was saved by aliens.

[maroberts]

I think Marc Remillard 'arranged' for them to be there

Time pressure

[Max_W]

One has to understand that at this epoch the USSR was very vulnerable. The US planes could fly over the whole Soviet territory, but the soviet planes could not even reach the USA.

That is why they tried to make from the rocket program more than it actually was. These first rockets could barely fly.

Re:Time pressure

[dunkelfalke]

Not quite. R7 test launches were required anyway, the rocket had a very large throw weight so Korolyov suggested to use it to launch satellites combining the tests with some useful payload and giving the Americans the finger as a triple win situation. As for the bombers, by 1957 the Soviets did already have the Tu-95.

Re:Time pressure

[DNS-and-BIND]

Vulnerable? WTF? The Soviet Union was closed. Like North Korea is today. The whole Second World was closed off. Where do you think the phrase "Iron Curtain" came from?

To get any information at all required ridiculous amounts of technology like developing the SR-71. By contrast, whenever the Soviets wanted to spy on somewhere, they sent a man out in a car from their embassy with the KGB's super-high tech spy equipment: a camera and a notebook.

Re:Time pressure

[rossdee]

"the soviet planes could not even reach the USA"

BS

The Bears had a long enough range to reack much of the continental USA, (coming over the north pole) although since they didn.t have air-air refueling it would have been a 1 way trip
and most would have been shot down

Re:Time pressure

[thinkwaitfast]

Germany was really the first into space. Above the Kármán line

Re: Time pressure

[JoeRobe]

Iâ(TM)ve heard this before and while the soviets had a lot of successes (which were impressive), to say that the US had only one success is disingenuous. NASA had many, many firsts:

First geostationary satellite
First successful interplanetary flyby
First mars flyby
First human orbit of moon
First humans on moon
First spacecraft to orbit another planet
First spacecraft in escape trajectory from sun
First Jupiter flyby
First gravity assist
First mercury flyby
First space shuttle launch
First Uranus and Neptune flyby
First Mars orbiter
First manned lunar rover
First Saturn flyby
First pictures from mars
First comet flyby (collaboration)
First asteroid flyby
First Jupiter orbiter
First planetary rover
First Saturn orbiter
First comet impact
First Pluto flyby

Re:Time pressure

[thinkwaitfast]

The Russians also.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This is a better obligatory link

[Snard]

Space Doggity

Re:This is a better obligatory link

[Snard]

My apologies for the broken link - I should have confirmed it before I posted, but I trusted the artist's own blog wouldn't have a dead link... If someone has an official link, I would appreciate if they could post it. Otherwise I'll assume people know how to find this stuff on their own.

Re:This is a better obligatory link

[pedz]

Is this what you are looking for? Jonathan Coulton - Space Doggity

On the other hand

[Mrakodrap]

How many americanised monkeys ended burned to death in explosions in USA's tests? I have heard of about 60 pieces of apes, incinerated during or shortly after lauch. But these truths are being kept under a deep deep all-deniable lid.

Re: On the other hand

[Paradise Pete]

It's still not a suicide unless the dog agrees.

That's was 420 years ago ...

[Desert Leap]

...in dog years.

Re:Poor dog.

[MightyYar]

She was a stray, selected because she was more well-behaved than the others.

Documentary on the USSR's space program

[kbahey]

Not sure if this will play outside Canada or not.

But here it is: Cosmonauts: How Russia Won The Space Program, a fascinating look at the USSR's space program, and what they got right, and why.

Definitely worth watching.

Re:Documentary on the USSR's space program

[Solandri]

Only if you define "won" as "got there first." The Japanese "won" the race to high definition TV, but all the HDTV standards today are based on the U.S. HDTV standards. Why? Because the Japanese version of HDTV was analog - that was the quickest way to transmit HDTV signals in the 1970s. The U.S. HDTV program didn't get started until the late 1980s, right around the time digital signal processors were rapidly improving in performance and dropping in price. Consequently the U.S. version of HDTV was digital, and compressed digital HDTV signals turned out to be much more practical than analog for HDTV.

Likewise, as a long-term solution to repeatedly getting things into space, rockets are not very efficient. The U.S. realized this soon after WWII and was gradually working on a series of experimental planes to fly into space. It mostly abandoned that approach after Sputnik turned space access political, turning it from a marathon into a sprint.

Now, 60 years later, after the world has invested trillions of dollars into rocketry R&D, we've seen the writing on the wall and are gradually shifting research back towards much more economically practical hypersonic flight. That is, what the U.S. was already doing in the late 1950s. Imagine where the technology might've been today if we hadn't been distracted by a political "space race." Maybe we'd already have 1 hour flights between North America and Europe/Asia. A moon base (the biggest impediment is the cost of getting materials into orbit to establish a base - rockets are damned expensive). Maybe even a Mars base (again, high cost of fuel for a Mars mission due to rockets being damned expensive). Who knows.

The same thing happened in computers. In the 1950s-1970s electronic transistors were a lot easier to make than optical transistors. Consequently everyone took the easy route and poured R&D into electronic transistors. That worked fine - computers were doubling in clock speed every 2-3 years - until about 2000. That's when we hit a brick wall. Current leakage in electronic transistors goes as something like the square of frequency, and it turns out about 4 GHz is the practical maximum. Beyond that, the power losses and cooling requirement make higher speeds impractical. The fastest Intel processor in 2002 was 2.8 GHz. Since then, we've only been able to push (mass-produced) clock speeds up to about 4.2 GHz. A 1.5x improvement in 15 years, compared to doubling every 2-3 years. Optical transistors would have no such limitation since it relies on quantum photons instead of lossy electrons. But because we dove headfirst into electronic transistors, our level of optical transistor technology is decades behind electronic transistors. Meaning nobody wants to spend much money on researching optical computing even though its future potential is much greater than electronic computing.

Sometimes the quickest route isn't the best route.

Re:Documentary on the USSR's space program

[kbahey]

Yes, 'won' here is 'got there first'. It is how the documentary was named, not a conclusion by me.

Russia still has a functional system that takes stuff to orbit for cheap (e.g. payloads to the space station), unlike the space shuttle, ...etc.

They built on their strength and did not invest much outside that. They don't have missions to Mars, they don't have space telescopes, ...etc.

But to be fair, they had to deal with a lot of political turmoil after the collapse of USSR, contrary to other countries.

Now, the race is on again, with still cheaper and cheaper rockets like what India has, and then we have private companies joining the race (SpaceX ...etc.). And Russia still does what it knows and only that.

Re:Documentary on the USSR's space program

[SvnLyrBrto]

Not that Moore's Law will necessarily last forever; but it doesn't actually predict a doubling of clock speed. It predicts a doubling of the number of transistors on a chip. And while clock speeds have been pretty stagnant, pretty much everything is multi-core nowadays. So I wouldn't worry about the apocalypse just yet. Damn application & game developers need to drag themselves out of the last decade and write proper multi-threaded code to take full advantage of modern CPUs, that's all.

Re:Documentary on the USSR's space program

[110010001000]

Um, Moore's Law died about 8 years ago.

I like Laika

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always loved Laika. His was a sad tale, a tragedy really. Poor Laika is in dog heaven now.

60 years ago...

[zantafio]

... the soviets came up with the most convoluted and expensive way to euthanize a dog.

Re:Poor dog.

[muons]

Who says well behaved bitches don't make history? (tongue in cheek) The real story in my mind is that there wasn't even a plan to bring her back. What possible use is there to sending her up in the first place? To say you have done it? Why should anyone care? OK, it was a first, but it is a successful operation where the patient died. At least the humans volunteering to go to mars with no hope of return are volunteers.

Re:Poor dog.

[MightyYar]

They didn't have the technological ability to bring her back, and they wanted to see if mammals could survive in space.

Poor Laika

[Jamlad]

The goodest of dogs.

Re:I bet she wasn't

[Jamlad]

Oh don't be a pedantic ass. You know what he meant.

Re: Fuck Russia

[93 Escort Wagon]

As opposed to criminal Cowboys who Start civil wars in foreign countries?

Like Ukraine?

Temperature control failure killed Laika?

[najajomo]

"Within a few hours of launch, temperature controls failed, killing the female dog named Laika"

No, the dog was electrocuted in orbit as the Soviets had yet to master controlled re-entry and the dog would have fried and/or been killed on impact. Even Gagarin had to bail out at twenty thousand feet and parachute to earth.

Re: Poor dog.

[MightyYar]

Yeah of course you are right they were under tremendous time pressure. But if you don't care about the fate of the dog, the flight still made logical sense... In what we used to call "concurrent engineering" teams work in parallel rather than waiting on one another to pass gates before proceeding. In this case, there's no reason for the life support team to wait on the reentry team.

Re:I bet she wasn't

[RockDoctor]

What he meant was probably not what he wrote. That's just fucking stupid.