Animals in space: from Laika to jellyfish & tortoises | HistoryExtra
"‘They put Sputnik II, the second satellite up, the difference being that this time it contained an animal. The animal was a dog and the dog was called Laika which means Barker. It was incredibly advanced. It was the first time a dog had been placed, any higher living organism in place in orbit around the world and it stunned the world. But the problem was, was the technology at the time, in the race to get ahead, did not exist to bring the dog home. She was given seven days of food and oxygen. She was in this tiny windowless box, basically buried inside the satellite, and round and round the planet she was supposed to go for seven days until it all ran out, and she would die in space because she couldn't come home. What actually happened was that she died from thermal exposure, from overheating of the capsule, it, the temperature rose to into the 40s. And she died within the first few hours.
So that was a secret that the Soviets kept for, and actually the Russians kept after that until 2002. Can you believe that secret was kept? They will claim she lasted for seven days. Half the world thought this is amazing. This is incredible. The Soviets are, how do they do this? They can't build refrigerators, let alone put dogs in space. And the American press after Sputnik called it muttnik or mutnik, you know, this was the big moment.
But there was also a huge amount of rage and anger in the West, from animal lovers and dog lovers. There were pickets, the United Nations in New York, there were demonstrations outside American embassies in many Western capitals. The National Canine Defense League in United Kingdom called for a minute's silence for Laika. It was, it was every time this this star as it were went overhead, there was the dog inside it…
As it happened, the spacecraft with the dead dog inside continued amazingly to orbit the planet for another 2,500 times, until it finally, from the force of gravity came back into the Earth's atmosphere the following April, five months later, and the dead dog inside the satellite basically was incinerated in the incredible fierce heat of reentry… they kept everything secret… absolutely, everything was kept secret unless there was a spectacular success. So everything about these, the space program, for want of a better word was kept secret, partly because it was allied to the missile program... any failure is either ruthlessly suppressed or dressed up to be a success. Laika being an example, she didn't die in the first few hours. She was meant to die in seven days. And that's what happened. And that's how they did it. That's why secrecy. And essentially lying is integral. It's woven into the very fabric of the political culture that existed on that side of the Iron Curtain...
What people didn't realize because it wasn't made a big deal of or it was kept completely secret is that the Soviets didn't send one dog into space. They sent scores of dogs into space, they sent at least 40, 45 dogs into space. Many of these dogs also died. There's an amazing story about one that went into space five times, can you believe it? Five times they put this poor dog on top of a rocket. We don't know exactly how many dogs there were, still to this day, because it's kept secret. I mean, it's just not clear. And many of the dogs change names…
All of these dogs were grabbed from the streets of Moscow by specially trained dog catchers, they would go out, they'd grab them, and the dog just had to get the right kinds of dog, they had to get dogs that were light colored. So it would show up on the cameras inside the cockpit more easily, they had to be the right size, has to be the right weight, because I was saying that replacing essentially a bomb that will be inside the top of these missiles. They had to be female, because it was easier to urinate that way. They designed special kind of urination tubes and trained, literally trained these dogs how to defecate and urinate inside the capsule. So they will actually be okay with what they had to do. And they had to be trained to stay still, for days. So they started by chaining them into these little containers for five minutes at a time, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, four hours, eight hours, until eventually some of these dogs could do 20 days at a time sitting in a small container with very little movement in a strange straitvest, with a you know, sometimes with a space helmet on in the early days, and later on in the pressurized capsule, a sealed hermetically sealed capsule and sort of chained in there...
The Soviets are using dogs, lots of them, as we said before, and the Americans are fundamentally using primates. They're using monkeys and they're using chimpanzees as well. Why? Well, at bottom, what comes what it comes down to at bottom is that the Soviets are looking for, essentially an animal that will that can be trained to obey, that will not rebel, that will not fight back, will not ask questions that will not be problematic. They will not be rebellious, that will be essentially, like an upstanding Soviet citizen. Or indeed, one could argue, an upstanding Soviet cosmonaut, because the cosmonauts would have no control over their vessel. Nor would the dogs have any control over their vessel. That was the plan, everything will be automated. Nor, frankly, would Soviet citizens have any control over their vessel, namely, the entire USSR. I mean, that is the kind of ideology that's kind of lying, integrated in the very woven into the DNA of this training.
If you like, on the American side, there was definitely going to be a much more of an element of control. The guys that were actually picked to fly these, these these first missions, were all hotshot test pilots, unlike the Soviet cosmonauts. So the real purpose here was to have people that could have some element of control over they were captains of their ships effectively, and they will accept no less. Now, to be able to do that you need an animal that has something more similar to the way we are... the chimpanzees had in front of them inside their little Mercury capsules, a device called a psychomotor. And a psychomotor, was basically a machine with some levers in front of it. And the animals had to push these or the pull these levers in respond to lighting cues...
September 1968… The Soviet lunar program is really falling apart by this point… And they're doing their best to kind of lie about it, but they're not lying about it very effectively. But it is really starting to fall behind. And their rockets keep blowing up. Nothing seems to be working properly... So what do they do? They don't send humans to the moon or round the moon to get ahead of the Americans. Even by two or three months, they sent tortoises to the moon'...
‘When [China] sent their first taikonaut, or astronaut or cosmonaut, whatever you call it, to space in 2003, there were no animals on board or no dogs on board, that spacecraft but there was dog meat, definitely on the menu because the first astronaut, the first Chinese astronaut actually talks about that quite openly that he you know, they would eat dog meat when they were up there. So that's how the dogs got into space in 2003’"
So much for all the tankies dissing the US's achievements in the space race - it's easy with selective disclosure and just riding off the missile program
Damn stereotypes about Chinese and dog meat!
China's first man in space Yang Liwei reveals astronauts ate dog meat to keep up strength
"Yang Liwei, who commanded the Shenzhou Five mission in 2003, revealed canine menu samples that were on-board his craft along with chicken and fish.
In his autobiography ‘The Nine Levels between Heaven and Earth’ he said: 'Many of my friends are curious about what we eat in space and think that the astronauts must have some expensive delicacies, like shark's fin or abalone.
'Actually we ate quite normal food, there is no need to keep it a secret,' he added, listing chicken, steamed fish and dog meat from Huajiang county in Guangdong.
Chinese nutritional experts recommend dog meat, especially in winter months.
Finding dog meat, bones and even skulls - they are boiled to make broth - in Chinese supermarkets, particularly in the north of the country, is by no means unusual...
Wohlfahrt tasted some standard astronaut fare before beginning his space food project. 'I felt sorry for the astronauts,' he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung. 'It tasted like cat food.'
He now offers Swabian potato soup, braised veal cheeks with wild mushrooms and plum compote."