Laika, the Pioneering Space Dog, Was Launched 60 Years Ago Today (space.com) 74
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."
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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.
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For all their faults, this would never have happened in North Korea.
Ready for launch? I thought you said lunch!
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She was a stray, selected because she was more well-behaved than the others.
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They didn't have the technological ability to bring her back, and they wanted to see if mammals could survive in space.
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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.
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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.
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I think Marc Remillard 'arranged' for them to be there
Obligatory (Score:2)
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=03282008
Re:Indeed... (Score:4, Funny)
You can get a special comb. Or a collar impregnated with chemicals.
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As opposed to criminal Cowboys who Start civil wars in foreign countries?
Like Ukraine?
North Korea should launch a dog into space (Score:1)
..and time the landing for lunchtime.
Time pressure (Score:5, Informative)
That is why they tried to make from the rocket program more than it actually was. These first rockets could barely fly.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: Time pressure (Score:2)
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 flyb
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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.
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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.
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"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
This is a better obligatory link (Score:2)
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On the other hand (Score:1)
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That's was 420 years ago ... (Score:2)
Documentary on the USSR's space program (Score:2)
Not sure if this will play outside Canada or not.
But here it is: Cosmonauts: How Russia Won The Space Program [tvo.org], a fascinating look at the USSR's space program, and what they got right, and why.
Definitely worth watching.
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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, th
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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.
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I like Laika (Score:1)
I've always loved Laika. His was a sad tale, a tragedy really. Poor Laika is in dog heaven now.
60 years ago... (Score:1)
I bet she wasn't (Score:1)
I've heard nothing of any attempts at sterilising Sputnik 1, so it's almost certain that it carried bacteria, insects and possibly tardigrades into space, where some would have persisted for a time.
Do people actually no think at all before committing their stream of consciousness to electrons?
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Poor Laika (Score:3, Insightful)
Temperature control failure killed Laika? (Score:1)
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 [wikipedia.org] had to bail out at twenty thousand feet and parachute to earth.