Strapped into a small compartment on the tiny spacecraft Sputnik 2, Laika died during her fourth orbit when her capsule overheated.
The Americans responded with the same panic that met the launch of the first Sputnik. Eisenhower ordered the Naval Research Laboratory—which had been working separately for years on launching an artificial satellite into space—to immediately prepare a manned spaceflight. In January 1958, America finally responded to the Soviets’ scientific aggression by launching a Vanguard rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida containing two stray dogs.
These dogs died an icy death within an hour of leaving the atmosphere when their cabin depressurized. They were hailed as national heroes, and became a massive propaganda coup for NATO. Behind the iron curtain, VOA broadcasts let anyone with a radio know that capitalists were more efficient at killing dogs in space than communists.
Khrushchev was livid. He ordered his scientists to embark on what became known as the Luna program. On the second day of 1959, Luna 1 was launched towards the moon with 17 dogs from the streets of Vienna aboard, three of which were pregnant. The dogs all perished by the time the craft reached the Van Allen belt.
NASA, which had been created the previous summer, embarked on Project Mercury, which blasted a succession of angry cats into deep space with their tails tied together. The Soviets responded with the Vostok program, which sent horses into orbit strapped into medical devices that would periodically revive them so that a single horse could be killed, theoretically, dozens of times.
In the 1960s the space race turned to a new goal: to be the first nation to kill a dog on the moon.
The Americans suffered a massive setback in 1967 when a test of the Apollo 1 capsule resulted in three dogs dying in an electrical fire on Earth, not in space. But in 1969 the lunar module of Apollo 11 landed on the surface of the moon. Before a global audience of nearly 1 billion people, the door of the Eagle opened and the three dogs perished within minutes.
The Soviets had been bested, but in 1971 they achieved another scientific breakthrough when they established the Salyut 1 space station, which embodied man’s ultimate ambition of creating a self-contained environment in space where generations of dogs could be bred and killed.
After the fall of the USSR, a team of scientists from Russia, the US, and other countries—led by the American dog-killing wunderkind Pete Buttigieg—worked together to build the International Space Station. This year is the 22nd anniversary of the launch of the ISS, which to this day remains functioning in orbit—with a fully staffed kill shelter that only services pit bulls—as a monument not only to the science of space exploration, but to harmony among men on Earth.
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