TALKING WITH NICK ABADZIS ABOUT LAIKA

[MattBrady]

by Michael C Lorah

Laika, also known as Kudryavka, among other nicknames, was the world’s first space traveler. A mixed breed husky found on the streets of Moscow, Laika was the passenger on Sputnik II when it launched on Nov. 7, 1957.

Comic book creator Nick Abadzis and First Second Publishing recently released the biography of this brave explorer. Laika follows the dog’s travails from her birth on the streets of Moscow through her entry into the Russian space program, to her ultimate fate in the tiny capsule of a rocket, beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.

Fueled by the big picture of Cold War politics and the intimacy of human compassion, Laika is a powerful window into the complicated circumstances surrounding 20th century science’s most famous canine.

We talked to Nick Abadzis about his research and interest in this project.

NRAMA: Nick, I’ve got to admit that the first thing I noticed about Laika is just how appealing the book is. The cover has a great design, and the subject matter really has something for everyone. It has outer space and scientific research, touches of politics, animals and the human interaction with each of the dogs that were involved with the Sputnik II program, and plenty of warm moments to complement the inevitable tragedy. In other words, a little bit of everything. So I guess I’m wondering what about Laika’s story appealed most to you and got you inspired to create this book?

Nick Abadzis: I’m glad you like that cover design. It was very last minute, but sometimes the pressure of a deadline can make you produce something good!

I agree, the appeal of the book is pretty broad, but I suppose that is inherent in the story and perhaps that’s what drew me to it in the first place. You can basically reduce the plot of the book to one line: ‘Dog shot into space aboard second artificial satellite’, and that’s what a lot of the books I had as a kid did, more or less. It wasn’t lurid, it was just a bald, banal fact but it had always struck me as something worth investigating and maybe expanding upon. New information about Laika’s fate came to light in 2002, and that’s when I really thought, ‘Ah!’ I’m interested in history, in Russia and the space race with the U.S., and I like animals. It was a no-brainer, really, so I set about collecting more information, although at that stage I really had no idea how much it was going to grow. I thought it might make a good short story, maybe something of a semi-documentary nature. It would’ve been so easy just to go with the ‘cute astrodog’ angle but the more I read, the less that seemed to do the story justice. I became interested in the background players, the engineers, technicians and physicians who were shadowy figures kept out of the limelight by the USSR’s regime. I sensed there was a much bigger story here, and I became very interested in the Soviet’s chief designer of rockets, Sergei Korolev and some of the other people who surrounded him who are perhaps even less well known.

Despite my earlier ideas, ultimately I’m a storyteller rather than a scholar; I gravitate naturally towards dramatization, and with all the reading I was doing, a story slowly cohered what I thought might fill in the spaces between the raw facts. It would be part imagined biography of Laika, part recorded history and I felt it would be a way to explore why we humans sometimes do what we do in the name of progress. Fundamentally, I found both Laika’s and Korolev’s stories interesting and moving. Along the way, a good many more of a cast of characters drawn both from real history and from my own imagination joined them to flesh out those lead players’ stories.

NRAMA: How extensive was the research that you did for Laika? You actually traveled to Russia to see the Sputnik II archives, correct?

NA: I approached a few institutions in Moscow, hoping perhaps to gain access to some archives or interview some of the remaining members of Korolev’s team, but I was on a limited timescale and not all of them got back to me in time. However, I went to the Museum of Cosmonautics where a contact there got me an invitation to look around Korolev’s house, which has been preserved as a private museum. That seems to be how things are done in Russia, you have to be invited, although I was quite warmly received. I don’t think they quite got that I was a cartoonist though, they just thought I was some kind of nutty enthusiast. I don’t speak Russian, and the staff at Korolev’s house don’t speak English so we ended up communicating through my (very poor) German. I got a good sense of Korolev from the visit though, which was really important to me to “find” his character. Going to Moscow was also important just to see the place, get a feel for its geography and culture and people. There’s no substitute for going to a place to see what it’s really like.

Back home, I also got some help with research from the head librarian of the British Library’s Russian Collection who was good enough to translate a few morsels of information from some memoirs she’d found for me. I also read a hell of a lot, scoured the Internet and unearthed a massive interview on Russian space medicine from the Smithsonian’s video history archive. That was very helpful in helping me establish the character of Oleg Gazenko, another key player in the book. I also bugged space experts around the globe about certain technical questions. I wanted to make the book as accurate as I could when it came to the feasibility of what I was plugging those aforementioned ‘gaps in the facts’ with. With regard to the visual look of things, I’ll admit that I sometimes embroidered things but that’s dramatic license. For example, I exaggerated the size of the rocket a bit. It made it look even cooler.

NRAMA: Ha! Exaggeration side, how much did you have to fictionalize? Laika’s earliest years were entirely invention?

NA: They are invented, but you can see many stray dogs all around the city even today, so it’s not difficult to extrapolate what her early life might have been like. She was between two and three years old when she was selected for the Sputnik II mission, so she must’ve been fairly young when she came into the possession of the space bureau IMBP (which wasn’t even called the space bureau in those days). Laika’s on record as being an even-tempered animal who wanted to please and who put up with a hell of a lot in terms of her training, so I felt it was my job to provide a plausible background to those aspects of her personality. Once she came to IMBP, I could apply what I knew about the generic training all the cosmodogs went through to Laika. As Chapter Three begins, there’s a lot of real history in there, although I should stress that the character of Yelena Dubrovsky is my own invention. She is very loosely based on an animal technician who worked with Gazenko at IMBP later than 1957; a woman who came from a big circus family and who was great with dogs.

NRAMA: There have been a lot of comments in post-Soviet years from scientists connected to Sputnik II about the tragedy of Laika’s flight. How much did those remarks play into how the story developed?

NA: If you’re referring to Gazenko’s quote at the end of the book, surprisingly little, actually. I came across that quote fairly early; it’s one of the things that’s been lifted from an address he made to the World Space Congress a few years back. I found it and forgot about it early on in the research process, but as I found out more about him it came back to me. I played with not using it but Gazenko’s warm character and sense of honor come across in a great deal of documentation I found about him; he really cared about those dogs. All the scientists cared, to some degree, about the cosmodogs, but as Gazenko was the one I was dealing mostly with, so in the end, it seemed natural enough to use the quote. But a lot of what I did with Gazenko, at least my version of Gazenko, was about getting into his skin and walking around in it; attempting to imagine what this dedicated and duty-minded scientist would feel were he to encounter some of the moral and emotional conundrums I put into the book. He seems like a pretty cool guy in real life; I certainly wanted to respect that.

NRAMA: Following that idea, I was impressed that all the scientists involved, even the director himself, are allowed to express a full range of emotions in dealing with their duty to the program and how that conflicts with Laika’s life being on the line. Was it difficult to find that balance?

NAYes, it was tough, but I always knew I wanted to avoid my cast of characters being ciphers. I did actually deliberately employ some tried and trusted ideas early on in the narrative when it comes to certain clichés of dead dog stories: kids and beloved dogs. It’s something you come across often enough in real life so it seemed silly not to use it. The child characters are there for a purpose; they all have an ‘adult analogue’ who carries further the themes that they each introduce. As for the other characters, well, it would’ve been easy to make them relatively one-dimensional order-following types who would represent their system; a system that ruthlessly and systematically crushed certain kinds of creative thinking just as a matter of course. But I tried to imagine what the reality of life was like for them and make them, well, just human beings who were trying to get on with it. In huge part, that’s what Korolev did – he adapted his amazing creative, technical and political skills to the system he lived under so as to realize his dream. That’s nothing if not romantic – not to take away from his astonishing qualities of adaptability and determination. But all the characters, real and imagined, come alive when you’re writing passionately and if you’re honest with yourself, you follow the line of the character. It might sound a bit ‘method’, but they’ll tell you where they’re going.

NRAMA: Laika is 200 pages. It could’ve easily been twice that. There are some massively dense pages in this book – I counted 21 panels on one page! How did you approach the storytelling and the pacing? Did you just have more story than you realized when you started?

NA: Yup, it could’ve been much longer. Part of it is that, after committing to a deadline and a certain page count, I chose to condense some story down that I didn’t want lose. But there’s equilibrium between pacing and density to be had and that’s what I aimed for. I think it’s stronger for that. The story grew, to be sure, and yes, it could’ve been double the length. But writing and drawing a comic or a narrative of any kind is a process of judicious self-editing anyway, and I threw a lot of stuff out. Also, comics grammar is supremely flexible and you can stretch it and deform it to extremes, as long as you don’t alienate your reader. There are all sorts of modern experiments going on with comics grammar and formal storytelling techniques; I don’t think Laika is unusual in pressing for less passivity on the part of the reader. I worked hard to create a sense of tension and of the odd patterns we project onto the randomness of life; this is all there in the design of the pages. There’s symmetry to the book if you look for it – the end is an echo of the beginning (and vice-versa); there’s a balance, a yin-yang aspect to the whole book. There are certain refrains that run all the way through it, almost like musical motifs.

NRAMA: Was it difficult to portray the dogs’ emotions without humanizing them?

NA: I think it would’ve been corny to do it that way and I would’ve run the risk of making it all a bit twee and overly sentimental. I wanted to engage the reader’s sense of empathy by giving them characters that would reflect their own humanity. You don’t even have to like dogs to empathize with Laika and her keepers’ plight. But yes, where it was tough not to give in to the ‘cuteness factor’, I knew I could never just tell the whole story that way as it would’ve reduced the emotional involvement on the part of the intelligent reader. Laika is – was – a cute dog, that’s a given, and it would’ve been so easy to anthropomorphize her to a great degree. By disallowing myself that get-out clause, by not having her narrate her own discomfort, I worked myself harder in making some scenes work, but I think it was worth it. Apart from anything else, as a narrative challenge it forced me to figure out some sequences that I might not otherwise have attempted.

NRAMA: What’s next up for you?

NA: I have another GN for First Second in the works and a bunch of smaller projects both for publishers in the US and the UK. I’m always excited by working with First Second: as a publisher they have a nose for unusual subject matter for comics. The next one will, in some senses, pick up from where Laika left off and I’m really enjoying the preliminary work I’ve done on it so far. But, however offbeat, I’m always trying to do something that engages, both for the reader and myself. I’m also looking to get some of my older work back out there, especially Hugo Tate, which was serialized in Deadline magazine and never fully collected. I continually get asked why that’s not in print so it seems to be time to deal with some of that back catalog. But, all told, there’ll be more work of the kind that allows me to explore the full range of human emotion and ambition, and I’m really enjoying doing that.

[Michael Hawk]

Looks really good.

[jackaction]

Art is great. Nice piece of history in comic form.

[OM]

...I'm actually looking forward to this, especially with regards to accuracy according to the various sources - Gazenko, Miskin, Siddiqui, etc. Of course, the real tragedy of Laika's mission is that, had Nikita Sergeivitch not banged his shoe and demanded a second, bigger stunt, Korolev would have had time to perfect the Zenit design and bring the mutt back safely. The accellerated schedule for propaganda purposes interfered with proper systems testing, which in turn led to the shroud not detaching properly from the R-7 "Semyorka" orbital insertion stage, which in turn a) caused the capsule to rapidly overheat and b) interfered with communications from ground controllers that prevented the signal to euthanize Laika from being received.

[Mike Thompson]

As a dog lover and one that is interested in the history of space exploration, I must have a copy of this. Looks to be something really good!

[frankbyrns]

I read this a couple of weeks ago -- Laika is tremendous.

For anyone interested, Nick has a booksigning scheduled for the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC next Saturday, Sept 29th.

[adamcasey]

I have this and it's great.

I also recommend the Swedish film "My Life As A Dog" which is more about an adolescent boy growing up, but with some parallels to Laika.

(Also check out the instrumental music of the band Laika & The Cosmonauts!)

[Jason Seaver]

This is, indeed, a really great little book. My only complaint is that it wasn't printed at a larger size - some of those pages are absolutely packed.

[Grimm22]

It looks good, but I don't know if I could read it without a bit of a frown, since it's apparent what Laika's fate is going to be. Dieing in the cold depths of space...alone

Even reading the review of it in Best Shot's brought a tear to my eye.

[nokahoma]

I pretty much bawled my entire way through this book a couple weeks ago. Abadzis heartwrenchingly shows how humans often don't deserve the trust put in them by domesticated animals. The fact that he doesn't anthropomorphize Kudryavka makes her plight all the more depressing. This is a great book, with some beautiful art, and I highly recommend it. If you love animals, though, don't read outside the comfort of your own home, unless you're cool with public and very quivery emotional eruptions.

[dpg]

This sounds like a great story, but being an idiot, I can never read it. The poor dog died a horrible death by burning up after four days of orbiting the earth.

I am a sap. Plague Dogs made me cry. There was no island damn it.

Those Russian bastards tested everthing on dogs.

[Aquajacket]

I just ordered a copy of this today. Can't wait to read it.

[ANGELDOGGIE]

WOW !! I am eagerly looking foward to this !! This is a great story about a great dog!! This is the perfect medium to tell it. This is a WINNER!! ( and yes......very much a tear jerker. )

[OM]

Originally Posted by Grimm22

It looks good, but I don't know if I could read it without a bit of a frown, since it's apparent what Laika's fate is going to be. Dieing in the cold depths of space...alone

....HEY! How about some spoiler warning there, kid!

Originally Posted by dpg

This sounds like a great story, but being an idiot, I can never read it. The poor dog died a horrible death by burning up after four days of orbiting the earth.

...Not trying to ruin sales of this book, but from Wikipedia(*) comes this brief overview of Laika's career as a cosmomutt:

The dog that would later be named Laika was found as a stray wandering the streets of Moscow. She was a mongrel female, approximately three years old, and weighed about 6 kg (13 lb). Soviet personnel gave her several names and nicknames, among them Kudryavka (Russian for Little Curly), Zhuchka (Little Bug) and Limonchik (Little Lemon). Laika, the Russian name for several breeds of dogs similar to the husky, was the name popularized around the world. The American press dubbed her Muttnik (mutt + suffix -nik) as a pun on Sputnik, or referred to her as Curly. Her true pedigree is unknown, although it is generally accepted that she was part husky or other Nordic breed, and possibly part terrier.

The Soviet Union and the United States had previously sent animals only on sub-orbital flights. Three dogs were trained for the Sputnik 2 flight: Albina, Mushka, and Laika. Russian space-life scientist Oleg Gazenko selected and trained Laika. Albina flew twice on a high-altitude test rocket, and Mushka was used to test instrumentation and life support. To adapt the dogs to the confines of the tiny cabin of Sputnik 2, they were kept in progressively smaller cages for periods up to 20 days. The extensive close confinement caused them to stop urinating or defecating, made them restless, and caused their general condition to deteriorate. Laxatives did not improve their condition, and the researchers found that only long periods of training proved effective. The dogs were placed in centrifuges that simulated the acceleration of a rocket launch and were placed in machines that simulated the noises of the spacecraft. This caused their pulses to double and their blood pressure to increase by 30–65 torr. The dogs were trained to eat a special high-nutrition gel that would be their food in space.

According to a NASA document, Laika was placed in the satellite on October 31, 1957—three days before the start of the mission. The temperatures at the launch site were extremely cold at that time of year, so a hose connected to a heater was used to keep her container warm. Two assistants were assigned to keep a constant watch on Laika before launch. Just prior to liftoff on November 3, 1957 from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Laika's fur was sponged in a weak alcohol solution and carefully groomed. Iodine was painted onto areas where sensors would be placed to monitor her bodily functions.

At peak acceleration Laika's respiration increased to between three and four times the pre-launch rate. The sensors showed her heart rate was 103 beats/min before launch and increased to 240 beats/min during the early acceleration. After reaching orbit, Sputnik 2's nose cone was jettisoned successfully. However, the "Block A" core did not separate as planned, preventing the thermal control system from operating correctly. Some of the thermal insulation tore loose, raising the cabin temperature to 40 °C (104 °F). After three hours of weightlessness, Laika's pulse rate had settled back to 102 beats/min, three times longer than it had taken during earlier ground tests, an indication of the stress she was under. The early telemetry indicated that Laika was agitated but eating her food. Approximately five to seven hours into the flight, no further life signs were received from the spacecraft.

The Russian scientists had planned to euthanize Laika with a poisoned serving of food after ten days.For many years, the Soviet Union gave conflicting statements that she had died either from oxygen starvation when the batteries failed, or that she had been euthanized. There were many rumours circulated about the exact manner of her passing. In 1999, several Russian sources said that she died after four days when the cabin overheated. In October 2002, Dr. Dimitri Malashenkov, one of the scientists behind the Sputnik 2 mission, revealed that Laika had died five to seven hours after launch from overheating and stress. According to a paper he presented to the World Space Congress in Houston, Texas, "It turned out that it was practically impossible to create a reliable temperature control system in such limited time constraints."Sputnik 2 was finally destroyed (along with Laika's remains) during re-entry on April 14, 1958, just over 5 months later, after 2,570 orbits.

...So, based on what we know about canine physiology, what most likely happened is that Laika collapsed from heat exhaustion about 2-3 hours into the mission, and then expired 1-2 hours later. The death is still tragic, but at least she didn't linger on for four days.

On the other hand, had Laika been a disgusting poodle, a killer pit bull, or a defoliating pointer, far less tears would have been shed

(*) ObDisclaimer: Wikipedia articles on the sciences are usually pretty trustworthy with regards to accuracy. It's the genre articles that are always to be taken with a *box* of salt and not just a few grains. Especially if they've been heavily edited by a pair of limey catamites from Englandland by the names of "Will" and "Matthew".

Originally Posted by nokahoma

The fact that he doesn't anthropomorphize Kudryavka makes her plight all the more depressing.

...I feel for you . Try *this* thought for comfort: in one of the first season eps of Lost In Space, Will Robinson finds a dog that apparently was sent up by the Russians and never returned. If you suspend disbelief in that a) the dog on the show was male, b) the dog was never seen again, and c) the dog survived fourty years in space, just pretend that Laika is currently alive and safe with the Robinsons, and is hopefully using Dr. Smith's leg in lieu of Tybo the Carrot Man

[Bevbos]

This looks sort of awesome.

[comicbookreader]

Wow, this seems really really good. And a very informative interview, too. I'll definitely pick this up now.

Thanks Newsarama for introducing me to something I might have easily overlooked in my Superhero/Big 2 world of comics reading!

[theodoros]

His name sounds greek, but I haven't heard anything about his previous works.

I have a student with the same name.

[OM]

...While we're here talking about Laika, for those wondering about the Sputnik II configuration, here's a photo of one of the engineering mockups:

...The mockup is currently located in the Polytechnical Museum, or Politekhnichesky Muzey in Moscow. The configuration is essentially a spare Sputnik 1 - the "basketball with the 102" CB Antennas" spherical satellite, fix-mounted above a semicylindrica pressurized capsule which contained Laika. Above the sphere is an additional radio-transmitter and science package - the "can" - which also served as a mount for a spring-loaded plunger assembly that a) pushed off the conical launch shroud and b) deployed a larger primary antenna as the mounts for the four Sputnik "whips" were used to mount the sphere - as well as the capsule - to the Block A orbital insertion stage. The entire Sputnik 2 assembly - all ~250lbs of it - remained attached to the Block A stage(*), although as noted previously the launch shroud failed to properly detatch, preventing complete deployment of the main antenna as well as disrupting the thermal characteristics of the entire stack.

(*) Side factoid: most people who saw Sputnik 1 with their nekkid eyes as it shot across the night sky actually saw the Block A stage; the "basketball", despite being chrome mirror polished, was simply too small to reflect enough light for your average 20/20 Mark 1 Eyeball to discern even with severe dark adaptation. Those who used a good pair of binoculars probably saw Sputnik 1, but might not have known at the timie whether they were looking at the booster or the satellite, and probably paid more attention to the brigher object anyway.

...The Sputnik 2 life-support system - including air and other consumables - was designed for a 7-day flight, although the systems could be tweaked by ground controllers at Baikonur to ration consumables to allow for an additional three days with minimum discomfort to the cosmomutt. Atmospheric maintainence was accomplished using a CO2 absorbing device, an O2 generator and regulator, and a fan that activated when the cabin temperature went above 15C for cooling and general air circulation. The capsule was made of aluminium alloys, with the surfaces polished and specially treated so as to absorb and/or reflect what was believed to be the right amount of solar radiation. However, this design proved severely inefficient with regards to the severe thermal conditions Sputnik 2 encountered in orbit, and the general concensus is that even if the launch shroud had been ejected as planned, the capsule would have still overheated to fatal levels within 2-3 days, if not sooner due to systems failure caused by overtaxing.

Orbital Map Of Sputnik 2

...Food and water for the canine occupant were ejected by a feeder tube directly into the stomach, and both urine and fecal matter were removed by another implanted relief tube that used a slight vacuum to compensate for the lack of gravity. Note that according to some Soviet sources, one of the additional factors that qualified Laika as the prime candidate for the flight was that she was not prone to chewing on the tube that was run down her throat to her stomach. Despite her relative placidity about the mission, the capsule contained necessary restraints to keep Laika from moving about while in orbit; this was necessary to prevent her from dislodging or disconnecting any of the feeder and relief tubes, as well as any of the electrocardiogram, respiration and other biosensors. This was even more important as the primary method of euthanasia was to introduce a gradual amount of cyanide into Laika's gel-food; the secondary method was to reduce the O2 content and increase the CO2 content until gradual asphyxiation occurred.

...All data was radioed to the ground only when Sputnik 2 was over the Soviet Union, as the Cold War and the Soviet penchant for secrecy worked against them by preventing the deployment of a global tracking network. The Soviets did, however, implement the same procedure they'd tried with Sputnik 1 - they "leaked" the launch window info to several astronomical observatories around the world, and even made the transmitter frequencies available so that both Radioastronomers and Hams could track the satellite as it flew overhead, knowing full-well that they'd all be bragging about not only receiving the signals, but reporting whatever data they could about the reception.

...In addition, a low-bandwidth facsimile TV camera was on board, which allowed Laika to be seen. However, only the images received prior to launch exist, as telemetry problems following launch prevented any TV signals from being downlinked. The Soviets did, as part of their propaganda efforts, claim that the footage received prior to launch was actually "from orbit". Said claims were not disprovable until the recent confessions due to the lack of any reference in the video to denote presence/lack of gravity. Ironically, this led to the Soviets developing what has become known as a "Boris Device", which is essentially something that dangles in front of a camera; if the chain is straight, you're obviously not in orbit!

...Another interesting bit of history about both Sputnik 1 and 2 is that they actually weren't the original satellites that the Soviets intended to launch. For an 18-month period between 1957 and 1958, the UN had declared the period to be the "International Geophysical Year", or IGY. During this period, nations from all over the world would participate in scientific projects and research sharing to get a better picture of our world, its environment and in essence looking at Earth as a *planet* and not just a bunch of regions and land masses. The Soviets had been dropping strong hints that they were intending to launch a small satellite into orbit as their contribution to IGY, but everyone in the west thought they were just talking big. October 4th, 1957 proved otherwise.

...However, what got launched for the first two satellites wasn't what was being designed and built for the IGY. That one wound up being Sputnik 3. It was conically shaped much in the same form-factor as the nukes that were designed for the R-7 "Semyorka" ICBMs, was 3.57 m long and 1.73 m wide at its base, and weighed 1327 kg. Sputnik 3 had 12 scientific instrument which provided data on pressure and composition of the upper atmosphere, concentration of charged particles, photons in cosmic rays, heavy nuclei in cosmic rays, magnetic and electrostatic fields, and meteoric particles. Just what the Premier ordered for IGY, natch.

....The problem was that, while the R-7 was ready for launch, Sputnik 3's assembly kept falling behind due what we now call "feature creep" - as soon as some device got installed, something smaller/faster/better/cheaper/neater got developed and the engineers and scientists would go about their tussles over whether or not to upgrade now or fix the design. Meanwhile, the Soviet hierarchy was getting nervous that Von Braun's team at Huntsville would deliver a surprise launch of a US satellite, thus beating the Soviets to the punch. Although they had no knowledge of the strings that were imposed by the Eisenhower administration upon the Huntsville team that would have allowed the Soviets to have beaten the US had their program slipped as much as 18 months, Krushchev still put the pressure on to get something into orbit before the end of 1957. This resulted in Korolev's "quick'n'dirty" solution of firing up a simple sphere with a transmitter - Sputnik 1 - which still wound up being the IGY event that overshadowed the IGY itself. The same concerns/paranoia that led to Sputnik 1 led to Sputnik 2 only a month later.

....Sputnik 3 wouldn't launch until May of 1958, right at the end of the IGY. Ironically, Sputnik 3 had a first of its own: The discovery of the outer radiation belts of the Earth were detected during the flight. However, its tape recorder failed, which prevented recording and downlinking of enough telemetry to map what would later be known as the Van Allen radiation belt. Without the continual feed of multiple data points, the detection of the belts were initially seen as sporadic detection of cosmic rays from an unknown source. It is not know, however, if the Soviets ever tried to contact Reed Richards for assistance prior to Van Allen's Explorer 1 solving the mystery

...Here's a YouTube slideshow clip. I have no idea what this chick is singing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTlGmb7Ze40

...This YouTube clip's a Soviet propaganda film about Sputnik 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-0BjdLChgY. They just don't make'em like this any more, kids

...Here's one of Laika in her compartment:


...And another. How much is that doggie in the capsule?


...On another side note, there's always been debate on whether or not Sputnik 2 was, in fact, built in only a month after Sputnik 1. My space history colleague Sven Grahn has a rather interesting bit of detective work on the facts: http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/histind/S...2/Sputnik2.htm. Enjoy!

...Oh, and just because I found it doing a Google search: http://www.amazon.com/Laika-Nick-Abadzis/dp/1596431016

[mister_e]

Color me intrigued. I'm picking this book up.

[SmileOnADog]

I remember as a kid, being a space travel nut, reading about Laika and being so sad when I figured out that the poor thing died alone in space. This is still pretty troubling to me. I hadn't thought about the famous pooch is so long so this is a must buy for me.

[caanan]

I bought this in San Diego and read it on the bus back to Denver. BIG mistake. I quickly ran out of tissues, and was wiping my eyes with my sleeves on a crowded bus...

This is easily one of the best things I've ever read - in terms of comics or novels. Just absolutely brilliant.

[ApacheDick]

Will the Space Monkeys be doing a reggae remix of this?

[pop monkey]

I'm ordering this book right now!

[Grimm22]

Originally Posted by OM

....HEY! How about some spoiler warning there, kid!

Well, what did you think was going to happen? That Laika came back and was a big hero? No this is the Soviet Union we're talking about here, they didn't care about their own goddamn people none the less dogs

[OM]

Well, what did you think was going to happen? That Laika came back and was a big hero? No this is the Soviet Union we're talking about here, they didn't care about their own goddamn people none the less dogs

...Oh, pipe down. See the smileys? That large number means that I was joking. It was humor. Look it up if you're unfamiliar with the term or the concepts behind it. Also, take a search through the threads for "Spoiler Warning" and see how many people bitch about the lack thereof. This was a jab at them, which you also obviously missed.

...Lessee, here's your homework for the weekend. Look up the following terms and don't come back until you have complete comprehension, appreciation *and* acceptance of each and every one of them:

• Joke
• Humor
• Satire
• Comedy

[shakes head in utter dismay]