Muttnik's Revenge

Sputnik 2 orbits Earth in 1957 from an animation by the author.

Sputnik 2, or Muttnik, as the press had dubbed it, carried a single passenger. A dog named Laika had been sealed into the spacecraft by Soviet scientists, with a limited air supply, and no way to return to Earth.

As a young third-grader living on an ice-bound Naval Base in the North Atlantic, I was fascinated by the dawning of the space age. I watched Douglas Edwards on The CBS evening news every night, but I still didn’t understand something.

From Cold ‘Coon & Collards:

I asked my mother how the animal could breathe in the vacuum of space. She told me that the ship was pressurized, and carried enough air to keep the cosmic canine alive for a few days. But Mother,” I said, “what will happen when the air runs out?”

Mother paused, carefully setting the rolling pin down, and turned to face her son. “The dog will die,” the young woman said as gently as she could.

This horrified me at the time. I was all for flying through space in a rocket, and exploring other planets, but the idea of locking a trusting animal into a steel cylinder and launching it into space to die, was something else. When I later found out that the orbiting spacecraft would eventually fall back to Earth with it’s expired Cosmo-dog, I was terrified.

I became obsessed. The falling spaceship would burn through the atmosphere, and unerringly crash through the roof of our family’s quarters, and strike me dead in my bed.

For years I had been dreading “The Rapture”, when Jesus would return to Earth, and the sinners would be left behind as the righteous rose to meet the savior in the air. Dread of the falling space dog now took the place of the rapture in my nightmares.

The murdered dog, commemorated on a Romanian postage stamp.

For more cosmic confusion, click here: Cold ‘Coon & Collards.