“Certainly, it’s still possible there are descendants of these Russian space dogs out there in the United States,” he says.Īs for the space dogs themselves, after the first successful flights of astronauts, the programme was wound down. Hager has attempted to track down Pushinka’s descendants but, so far, has drawn a blank. When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Pushinka was given to a White House gardener and later gave birth to another litter of puppies. Two of Pushinka’s puppies – nicknamed “pupniks” by the President – were donated to American children who wrote to Jackie Kennedy asking to look after the dogs. “I like to think of Pushinka as part of the thought process as they were going through the missile crisis, and a reason why he didn’t listen to the hawks in the White House who wanted to bomb Moscow immediately.” “That really helped them back down when it came to the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later,” says Hagar. “Kennedy and Khrushchev had this back-channel communication going on and exchanged several gifts during that time period. “It’s more than just a gift, I think of Pushinka as being significant historically,” Hager says. “I like to think of it as a Cold War romance,” says Hager.īut the gift of Pushinka, he believes, had greater diplomatic importance and even helped prevent World War Three. The canine couple ended up having puppies. Although the President was allergic to dogs, Pushinka spent time with the children and became friendly – very friendly – with another White House dog, Charlie. “A few weeks later one of the puppies showed up at the White House with a little Russian passport.”Īfter being screened for surveillance bugs by the FBI, the dog – Pushinka – took up residence with the First Family. “He mentioned that Strelka had had puppies, and she said you must send one of those puppies to me,” says Andrew Hager, historian in residence at the Presidential Pet Museum. During dinner, however, Jackie Kennedy started talking to the Soviet leader about the space dogs. By all accounts it was a difficult meeting. In June 1961, two months after Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth, President John F Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev held their first joint summit in Vienna. Then the story takes on a whole new dimension. “Their fame spread internationally – there were stamps, postcards, they were absolutely everywhere,” says Southgate. “It certainly compounded the impact on the United States – as it was so heavy, it confirmed the Soviets had the ability to put a nuclear warhead on a rocket and deliver it to the US.” “You could argue that it had as big an effect as the first Sputnik,” says Millard. And, by launching a sizeable 113kg (249lb) capsule with a live animal on board, it appeared the Russians were way ahead of the Americans when it came to space and missile technology. Still, for the Soviet Union, the mission was another propaganda coup and space dog Laika became a national hero. The deadly germ warfare island abandoned by the Soviets.The world’s oldest scientific satellite is still in orbit.The Soviet Union’s flawed rival to Concorde.It emerged in 2002 that the dog had only lasted seven hours before dying of panic and heat exhaustion. Once successfully in orbit, the world was told how Laika would survive a week in comfort, with plenty of food and water, before passing away painlessly. “It was at the height of the Cold War and this was serious stuff, part of a struggle between the superpowers.”
“This was always going to be a one-way mission,” says Doug Millard, space curator at London’s Science Museum.
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But in the scramble to get the spacecraft ready in time, no-one had figured out how to get the animal back alive. Following the success of Sputnik 1 on 4 October, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had ordered a dog be flown within a month. The engineers who sealed Laika into a narrow, windowless Sputnik 2 space capsule on 3 November 1957 knew it was the last time they would ever see her.
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