Others said it was a meteor, the fiery path of a meteoroid burning in the Earth’s atmosphere, what we like to call a shooting star. Some reported that they had seen a comet. It must have been so, for along the eastern seaboard of the United States, and out over the Caribbean, out to the east of the islands of Saint Thomas, Antigua, Martinique, Saint Lucia, Barbados, Trinidad, on to British Guiana (now Guyana), and over a host of ships in the Atlantic positioned between 10 and 20 degrees north latitude, people gazing skyward saw a path of burning light. The poet’s condition and the dog’s is that …Īpril 14, 1958, must have been a particularly clear night, one of those nights you remember for the great wash of the cosmos overhead, and for the black blackness of interstellar space punctuated by stars uncountable. While a few of the other space dog flights rival Laika’s in endurance and technological advancements, Caswell argues that Laika’s flight serves as a tipping point in space exploration “beyond which the dream of exploring nearby and distant planets opened into a kind of fever from which humanity has never recovered.”Įxamining the depth of human empathy-what we are willing to risk and sacrifice in the name of scientific achievement and our exploration of the cosmos, and how politics and marketing can influence it- Laika’s Windowis also about our search to overcome loneliness and the role animals play in our drive to look far beyond the earth for answers. Through this intimate portrait of Laika, we begin to understand what the dog experienced in the days and hours before the launch, what she likely experienced during her last moments, and what her flight means to history and to humanity. Profiling the scientists behind Sputnik II, he studies the political climate driven by the Cold War and the Space Race that expedited the satellite’s development. Kurt Caswell examines Laika’s life and death and the speculation surrounding both. Laika’s Window positions Laika as a long overdue hero for leading the way to human space exploration. Only in recent decades has the real story become public: Laika died after only a few hours in orbit when her capsule overheated. People believed that Laika died a painless death as her oxygen ran out. Initially the USSR reported that Laika, the first animal to orbit the earth, had survived in space for seven days, providing valuable data that would make future manned space flight possible. ![]() Laika began her life as a stray dog on the streets of Moscow and died in 1957 aboard the Soviet satellite Sputnik II.
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