S04 Episode 2 Extra: Dog Star

albirds dot com. That's alllbi rds dot com. Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClean smith, where for the weeks in between episodes, we look at the stories that, for one reason or other, didn't make it into the show. In last week's episode, Coming to You Live, we learned briefly about the launch of the Telstar satellite, which in July nineteen sixty two became the world's first active communication satellite, propelling us into a new media age of instantaneous global communication.

The satellite was just one of an extraordinary array of space firsts for humanity, which had begun with the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik I in nineteen fifty seven, and was followed soon after by cosmonaut Yuri Gagerin, becoming the first human in outer space in nineteen sixty one. Two years later, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space, and only five years after that, Neil Armstrong of Nassa's Apollo eleven mission achieved the ultimate prize of becoming the

first human to step foot on the Moon. The moments symbolized by Gagerin and Armstrong are simply seismic achievements in the annals of human history, and however future historians choose to condense our present age, their names are unlikely to

ever be excluded from the retelling of it. What is less well known, however, is the story of those other animals who helped them, and one in particular who became the first sentient creature to orbit the Earth, A stray dog plucked from the streets of Moscow that beat them all.

This is her story. Though serious plans to put a human in space were circulating among rocket scientists in the early twentieth century, it wasn't until the development of the Fowls Vye rocket, also known as v two during the Second World War that it started to be considered as a genuine possibility. A team led by genius aerospace engineer Erna von Braun had developed the rocket for use by

the military of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. It isn't clear just how supportive von Braun had been of Hitler, However, there is little doubt that his interest in rockets had only ever been for use in space travel, remarking dryly when first hearing news of the V two's successful deployment in London that the rocket had worked perfectly well, with

the exception of having landed on the wrong planet. In the aftermath of the defeat of the Third Reich and Hitler's German National Socialist Workers Party, the United States and Soviet Union's governments, whose own forays into rocket technology lagged hopelessly behind von Braun's, soon found themselves in possession of a superior weapon they didn't understand. But who better to help decipher it than the scientists who built it themselves, proving that all is indeed fair in love and war.

In nineteen forty six, the two governments launched the two secret operations of paper Clip and so Aviakim that sought to take the best German science had to offer and put them to work on their own weapons development. The biggest catch of them all, Von Braun was adopted by the United States, with his program manager Helmut Gertrup going the other way and placed under the watchful eye of

Soviet rocket engineer Sergei Korolev. Though Korolev realized almost immediately the potential that their newly acquired rocket technology offered for space exploration, the Stalin led Communist Party, understandably rattled by the recent US deployment of the atomic bomb, preferred to focus their efforts on their use in the deployment of

nuclear weapons. However, with the announcement in nineteen fifty four of the US Army and Navy's plan to launch the world's first artificial satellite, the space race was born, and though launching a satellite would be the first prize, true mastery of the cosmos would only be demonstrated by the nation that could first put a human up there. Planning to launch someone into space was one thing. Doing it, however, was quite another matter. Entirely, the first issue was one

of sheer durability. When the first V two rockets, which traveled at three and a half thousand miles per hour were launched. The fastest a human had ever traveled relative to the Earth was three hundred and ninety four miles per hour. To achieve orbital velocity, however, would require having to reach a speed somewhere closer to seventeen thousand miles per hour. It wasn't even known if the human body could withstand such a thing, and it was decided that

there was only one way to find out. In the US spearheaded by the U. S. Army Air Corps, Project Albert, became the first in a series of experiments designed to test the physiological impact of space travel on the body.

Being unwilling to risk the lies of human test subjects, they alighted on the use of recess monkeys for the task instead, and so it was that, on eleventh June nineteen forty eight, at the White Sand's Missile Range in New Mexico, Albert one became the first of what we might clumsily describe as an animal of higher learning launched

into the atmosphere in the name of scientific progress. The plan was to have Albert launched and returned to Earth safely, provided he survived the flight via a parachute linked to

a detachable compartment of the rocket's nose cone. An ECG needle and respiration unit was stitched directly into his skin to monitor vital science before he, with his body having been stretched out and arms strapped to his side, was placed head first into a cylindrical container measuring roughly three foot by one foot in size, and then installed into

the nose cone of a modified fee To rocket. To give them the best chance of achieving some useful results from the experiment, the scientists anastatized Albert forty five minutes before the flight in order to prevent him from waking up and dying of shock during takeoff, then promptly launched him at thousands of miles an hour into the air.

Due to a slight malfunction and premature burnout, the rocket only reached thirty seven miles in height before the nose cone detached, sending Albert hurtling back down toward the Earth at terminal velocity. A further malfunction prevented the parachute from opening until the device was only twenty five thousand feet above the Earth's surface, by which point the sheer speed

of the vehicle rendered the parachute completely useless. Seconds later, the nose cone containing Albert was obliterated on impact with the desert sands. There was no chance of survival, though it was later suggested that due to the cramped conditions in the nose cone, Albert had in fact already suffocated

some time before take off. The following year, Albert two became the first monkey in space after his rocket made it beyond the sixty two mile high Carmen Line, commonly considered the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space. Albert two was propelled to roughly eighty three miles above the Earth before another parachute malfunction cost him his life.

In the Soviet Union, it was decided instead to use dogs for the purpose of space research, due in part to the abundance of strays roaming the streets of Moscow. Stray dogs also had the added bonus of hardy and resilient natures built up through a lifetime of survival on

the often harsh and unforgiving streets. In nineteen fifty a kennel was built at the USSR Air Forces Institute of Aviation medicine in Moscow, and soon after filled with hapless canines looking out with concerned curiosity at the strange new world they had found themselves in, oblivious to the horrors that were shortly to come. The institute, led by doctor Vladimir Yazdovsky, at the sole purpose of training the dogs

for space flight, and the criteria was simple. Suitable candidates had to be small, weighing between thirteen to sixteen pounds and between eighteen months and six years in age. It was also important that the dogs had light fur so their movements could be more easily tracked on film. Lastly, in the main only female dogs were considered due to the difficulties of attaching the specially designed sanitary devices required

for journeying in the rockets to males. First, the dogs were put through a series of endurance tests, beginning with measuring their ability to withstand prolonged confinement. This involved a little more than being placed in a restraining suit and locked inside a small box for four hours at a time. Next, they would be placed in centrifuge machines and propelled at speed, subjecting them to the forces of gravity five times above the norm, as they might experience during a rocket to

take off. Further tests were then conducted on how well the dogs fared under weightlessness and extremes of atmospheric pressure, before finally they would be placed in simulations of the cacophonous and violent conditions of takeoff to see if they

could handle the stress of it. With testing completed, the dogs were divided into three distinct personality groups from even tempered to restless and sluggish, which in turn would help to decide if they were best suited to being strictly rocket dogs, meaning they would only ever be used in short test flights, or if they would be elevated to the status of satellite dogs, dogs that were considered strong enough to survive in space. Are you always taking care

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get started. That's teladoc dot com slash Unexplained podcast. In the winter of nineteen fifty, doctor Yazdovski was informed by Sergei Korolev that the first biological launches would take place the following summer. The time had come to select the dogs for it, with a launch date of twenty second July nineteen fifty one confirmed. Two dogs named Seagan and Debt Sick emerged as leading candidates to withstand the rigors

of the flight. By this point, the US had conducted five monkey lead biological space test flights, and all of them had resulted in the death of the test subject, and so it was in the early hours of July twenty second at the kapustin Ya rocket launch site, located seventy five miles to the east of Stalingrad, that Seagan and Detzik were placed in their oxygenated flight capsule, and, after receiving a pat on the head by doctor Yazdovsky, were sealed in and loaded into the nose of the

Soviet Arwan rocket. A number of scientists, party member dignitaries, and military personnel gathered to watch as the rocket took off, all waiting with bated breath to observe the fate of the two dogs. Moments later, a small tubular object was spotted high up in the sky, tumbling through the air at speed, with no sign of a parachute. The crowd gasped in horror as the object crashed into the ground

in a sudden blaze of light. But then something else appeared, this time conical in shape, falling through the sky before being suddenly slowed down by a vast parachute ballooning open from behind it. Yazdovsky raced the nearest jeep and sped off in the direct of the cone that had now landed a few miles away, bursting open the hatch. Moments later, he found the two dogs a little shaken but otherwise unharmed, staring up at him with their tongues wagging and panting hard.

Seagan and Debt Sick had become the first animals of their kind ever to survive a rocket flight. Sadly, however, Debt six's participation in the space program would be short lived when, on her second flight the following week, in tandem with another dog named Lisa, their capsule parachute didn't deploy. On hearing the news, Anna Tolly Blagmrovov, another leading Soviet space scientist of the time, released Seagan from the program

and adopted her as his pet. Over the next two months, a total of nine dogs flew on six flights, but only five of them would survive the speriments. But over the next few years, focus again turned toward the manufacture of evermore powerful rockets, and though the Space doc program continued to provide useful information, there were no plans to do anything more sophisticated than what had previously been achieved.

All that changed, however, when on the fourth of October nineteen fifty seven, the Soviet Union stunned the world by announcing the successful launch of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite.

Nikita Krushchev, the first secretary of the Communist Party, was so flattered by the global response to the achievement that he suggested the party capitalize on the attention by launching a second satellite on the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution that was due to take place just over a month later on November seventh. Sir Guy Karlov, equally caught up in the excitement of it all, had a

better idea. Why not launch a dog with it to two and become the first nation to put a living creature into orbit. With the stakes now significantly higher, training at the kennel was intensified accordingly. Where before the dogs were assessed on their ability to withstand four hours in a confined space, now they had to endure twenty days. Only ten dogs successfully passed the test, which were then whittled down to six before finally one candidate emerged above

all others, a small white mongrel named Albina. However, since Albina had already flown two missions and had just given birth to a litter of puppies, the team decided that she had already done enough and so the next best candidate was chosen, a two year old husky mix weighing no more than thirteen pounds with a distinctive white line running down the middle of her black furred face, called

Kudriavka or little curly. Shortly after her selection, however, the team became fond of her distinctive bark and so she was given the name Lycha instead, which translates loosely to barker in Russian. With less than two weeks to go to the launch, doctor Yazdovski's team set about Preparinglya's body for the momentous flight. To be able to record her blood pressure, her carrottid artery was pulled from out of the neck and her skin cut in such a way as to allow the artery to remain on the outside

of her body. It would then be compressed periodically by an inflated rubber ball in order to take measurement. Silver electrodes one fifth of an inch in diameter were then inserted just beneath her skin to monitor her heart, with the connecting wires also under the skin, being threaded along her back and emerging on the outside of both sides of her spine. By twenty seventh of October, news of Lica's impending mission was beginning to filter around the world.

Later that afternoon, Lyka captured the hearts of the nation when she was heard barking in response to questions from a reporter from Radio Moscow, but few were aware of the implications of the mission, for this was not a two way trip. Realizing she had only dazed to live, doctor Yazdovski took like a home to visit his family, where she played with his children for a number of hours. The following day, she was placed on a flight to the bacon Or Cosmodrome, a remote spaceport located in the

South Kazakhstan desert. At ten a m on the morning of October thirty. First, Lyca was taken for a walk, then afterwards had her wounds, still raw from the insertion of the electrodes coated in iodine. Twelve censes in total were applied to her body and her sanitation device fitted before being strapped into her vest and harness. At two p m. Food was placed in the feeding device, designed to release only one load to last as long as would be required, after which Lyca was placed into the

rocket capsule in between two large cushions. Calmly, she lay down on her front paws and watched the people in white coats as they lowered the heat shield into place above her. Finally, they sealed up the capsule, leaving its one porthole window located just above her head. The capsule was then in turn fixed into place at the very top of an R seven rocket and left for three

days while Lyca's vital signs were monitored. For the next seventy two hours, she looked up with the same quizzical expression whenever a white coated human peered in through the porthole window, until finally the moment had arrived. At five thirty am Moscow time on Sunday third of November nineteen fifty seven, Lyca, along with a Sputnik two satellite, was blasted into space. Human beings start to experience severe pain

and hearing loss. At one hundred and forty descerbels inside her capsule, Lyca would have endured some and closer to two hundred decibels. This, coupled with the stress of enduring five times the force of gravity, sent her heart rate racing to two hundred and sixty bpm, three times the norm, and her breathing also quickened to four times the usual amount.

Eight minutes later, having in that time traveled from nought to seventeen and a half a thousand miles per hour, Lyca reached the Carman line only a few minutes after that. Having reached the orbiting height of one hundred and forty miles above the Earth, the nose cone detached and the first telemetry signals were received at mission control. Lyca was alive and floating in space, the first living creature of

Earth in orbit. The capsule would eventually settle, traveling at a speed of five miles per second as it made its first complete orbit of the globe in roughly one hundred and three minutes. However, with the capsule only traveling across Soviet airspace for fifteen minutes of that circuit, they had only that window of time to access data, and unbeknownst to the rest of the world, it had become quickly apparent that something inside the capsule was drastically wrong.

Later that day, on November third, putting aside any diplomatic differences, the front page of The New York Times triumphantly hailed

Soviet fire's new satellite carrying dog. Articles released the following day even went as far as to suggest that Lycha could even be recovered from the flight and brought safely back to Worth, and articles from as late as the seventh of November indicated that doctor Yazdovsky's team were still receiving signs of life from the dog, but soon with journalists noting that Lyca was no longer being mentioned in a fish or communications, the sad truth was beginning to

dawn that she had in fact been dead for four days, suffocated by a defect in the capsule that allowed the temperature inside to soar above a hundred degrees fahrenheit. Just after midnight on April fourteenth, nineteen fifty eight, a series of UFO sightings were reported along the East coast of

the United States. As was documented by Paul Dixon in Sputnik The Shock of the Century, a bluish white object had been seen traveling across the sky at lightning speed, before suddenly turning red and separating into several smaller objects. What had in fact been witnessed was the reentry into the Earth's atmosphere of the capsule carrying the Sputnik to satellite the dead body of Lyca before its eventual disintegration.

Three years later, on the twelfth of April nineteen sixty one, Yuri Gagarin became the second animal to orbit the Earth. Scientist Oleg Gatzenko, who had worked on the like A launch, would later muse that the more time passed, the more he was sorry about her death, and that we didn't learn enough from the mission to justify it. And yet within this statement lie deeper, complex and often troubling questions

about these types of experiments. Some will argue that no animal should ever be sacrificed or forced to endure such suffering, that only consenting human volunteers or synthetic means should be used to collect the necessary information. Others might argue, however, that we are to go into space if we desire that, if we want to know more about what is out there, or even if one day humanity might even need to escape planet Earth. That the suffering brought on these animals

was a terrible but necessary price to pay. And this is a complicated thing to know that that is the price, but to do it anyway is as equally human as to reject it. Entirely. In any case, regardless of what you believe, there is perhaps one thing that we can all agree on that whatever benefit comes of our experiments in space, let it be known that we will owe it not only to the likes of Gagerin, Tereshkova and Armstrong, but also to Albert Seagan and Debt Sick, and of

course to Lia. If you enjoy listening to Unexplained and would like to help supporters, you can now go to Unexplained podcast dot com Forward Slash Support. All donations, no matter how large or small, are massively appreciated. All elements of Unexplained are produced by me, Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes. Feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an

explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com, or on Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained. Now it's time to take care of yourself. To make time for you, Tell a doc gives you access to a licensed therapist to help you get back to feeling your best, speak to a licensed therapist by phone or video anytime between seven am to nine pm local time, seven days a week. Teledoc Therapy is available

through most insurance or employers. Download the app, or visit teledoc dot com Forward slash Unexplained Podcast Today to get started. That's t e ladoc dot com Slash Unexplained Podcast