Space Dogs

Meet the canine heroes of the Soviet space programme

Dogs have been man’s best friend for tens of thousands of years. Their superior tracking abilities, combined with man’s superior killing abilities, made them invaluable to early hunter-gatherers.

This relationship persists to today, but the apex of the bond of friendship between the two species may have come in 1957, when a three-year-old mongrel named Kudryavka (“Little Curly”) was picked up on the streets of Moscow. She weighed about six kilograms, was part husky and part terrier, and had survived through several harsh Russian winters.

That made her the perfect candidate for an experimental programme being run by the Soviet government. Vladimir Yazdovsky was a medical scientist in the space program, who’d launched a number of dogs to altitudes of more than 450km in pressurised rockets.

While the US test rocket programme used monkeys, about two thirds of whom died, dogs were chosen by the Soviets for their ability to withstand long periods of inactivity, and were trained extensively before they flew. Only stray female dogs were used because it was thought they’d be better able to cope with the extreme stress of spaceflight, and the bubble-helmeted spacesuits designed for the programme were equipped with a device to collect feces and urine that only worked with females.

Training included standing still for long periods, wearing the spacesuits, being confined in increasingly small boxes for 15-20 days at a time, riding in centrifuges to simulate the high acceleration of launch, and being placed in machines that simulated the vibrations and loud noises of a rocket.