The camera follows these modern creatures low to the ground, with minimal narration, creating a roving, diaristic dog’s-eye view. Space Dogs weaves its ghastly tape of the Soviet space race with footage of a pair of contemporary Muscovite strays going about their daily canine lives. It is a stylish and honest film-a rare combination!-but also merciless. In fact, if I had to imagine the film I would least like to be forced to watch, Clockwork Orange-style, with my eyes pried open, it might be this one. The film doesn’t have footage of Laika suffering in space (thank God) but it does have plenty of clips of scientists putting Laika and a few other research dogs through a barrage of exercises-they spin in a centrifuge, dazed-and subjecting them to invasive, gruesome surgeries in order to rig them up with the necessary sensors to see how long they’d last alone above the planet’s atmosphere. In reality, she lasted less than a day before heat and stress killed her, turning the object of cosmic progress into her small coffin. For years, the party line from officials was that Laika had been humanely euthanized before the satellite reentered the atmosphere. Despite initial assurances to the public that the pup would come back unharmed, she was always intended as a sacrifice to scientific progress, as there was no way to return her to Earth at the time.
In 1957, the Soviet Union sent Laika to space in the satellite Sputnik 2. By the fourth orbit, some five hours into the flight, Laika’s telemetrics went silent, ending the life of the first living being in space.įour years later, Yuri Gagarin accelerated the Soviet’s lead in the Space Race, when the cosmonaut orbited the earth for 108 minutes, before parachuting from his capsule after re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere.Space Dogs uses archival footage to tell the story of the clever, docile, and doomed Moscow street dog Laika, the first mammal to go into orbit-and the first mammal to die there. By Laika’s second orbit, a gross miscalculation in thermodynamics caused the space capsule to become increasingly overheated. While the Soviet space program learned much about mammalian physiology in space, Sputnik 2 was so hastily assembled that the program had no plan to safely return Laika to earth. Once in space, Laika’s breathing and heart rate grew slower and deeper, despite the deteriorating conditions inside the tiny capsule. On launch day, telemetric sensors recorded a threefold increase in Laika’s heart rate, while the g-forces during liftoff caused the animal’s respiratory rate to increase fivefold. On November 3rd, 1957, Laika the dog would become the first living being ever to be launched into space. Khrushchev’s order left Soviet scientists with less than a month to accomplish the feat. Chosen for her ability to withstand centrifugal g-forces and a superior aptitude for sitting, eating and going to the bathroom in a confined space, Laika would soon be the first living creature to be launched into space.Īfter the historic and quite polarizing launch of Sputnik 1, which instantly ignited the Cold War Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev ordered a second triumphant space flight to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Laika the dog, the commander of Sputnik 2, grew up on the streets of Moscow, possessing little vision about being the first living creature in space.
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