Category: Exploration
April 14, 1958 Laika
The day before the launch sequence, Vladimir Yazdovsky took her home to play with his kids. "I wanted to do something nice for her," he explained. "She had so little time left to live."
At the dawn of the space age, no one knew whether the human body could survive conditions of rocket launch and space flight. The US Space program experimented with a variety of primate species between 1948 and 1961, including rhesus monkeys, crab-eating macaques, squirrel monkeys, pig-tailed macaques, and chimpanzees.
"Miss Baker"
On May 28, 1959, a squirrel monkey named "Miss Baker" became the first of the US space program, to survive the stresses of spaceflight and related medical procedures. A rhesus monkey called "Miss Able" survived the mission as well, but died four days later as the result of a reaction to anesthesia.
Soviet engineers experimented with dogs on a number of orbital and sub-orbital flights, to determine the feasibility of human space flight. The Soviet Union launched missions with positions for at least 57 dogs in the fifties and early sixties, though the actual number is smaller. Some flew more than once.
Most survived. As with the early US program, those who did not often died as the result of equipment malfunction. The first animal to be sent into orbit, was a different story.
Three dogs were plucked from the streets of Moscow and trained for the purpose. "Laika" was an 11lb mutt, possibly a terrier-husky cross. In Russian, the word means "Barker". Laika was chosen due to her small size and calm disposition. One scientist wrote, "Laika was quiet and charming."
First, were the long periods of close confinement, meant to replicate the tiny cabin of Sputnik 2. Then came the centrifuge, the highly nutritional but thoroughly unappetizing gel she was meant to eat in space, and then the probes and electrodes that monitored her vital signs.
Sputnik 2, Pre-Launch Propaganda
Laika was placed inside the capsule for three days, tightly harnessed in a way that only allowed her to stand, sit and lie down. Finally, it was November 3, 1957. Launch day. One of the technicians "kissed her nose and wished her bon voyage, knowing that she would not survive the flight".
Sensors showed her heart rate to be 103 beats/minute at time of launch, spiking to 240 during acceleration. She ate some of her food in the early stages, but remained stressed and agitated. The thermal control system malfunctioned shortly into the flight, the temperature inside the capsule rising to 104°, Fahrenheit. Five to seven hours into the flight, there were no further signs of life.
There were official hints about Laika parachuting safely to earth, and then tales of a painless and humane, euthanasia. Soviet propaganda portrayed "the first traveler in the cosmos", heroic images printed on posters, stamps and matchbook covers. Soviet authorities concealed Laika's true cause of death and how long it took her to die. That information would not be divulged , until 2002.
In the beginning, the US News media focused on the politics of the launch. It was all about the "Space Race", and the Soviet Union running up the score. First had been the unoccupied Sputnik 1, now Sputnik 2 had put the first living creature into space. The more smartass specimens among the American media, called the launch "Muttnik".
Sputnik 2 became controversial, as animal lovers began to question the ethics of sending a dog to certain death in space. In the UK, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals received protests before Radio Moscow was finished with their launch broadcast. The National Canine Defense League called on dog owners to observe a minute's silence.
Protesters gathered with their dogs in front of the UN building, to express their outrage. In the Soviet Union, political dissent was squelched, as always. Of all Soviet bloc nations, it was probably Poland who went farthest out on that limb, when the scientific periodical Kto, Kiedy, Dlaczego ("Who, When, Why"), reported Laika's death as "regrettable". "Undoubtedly a great loss for science".
Sputnik 2 and its passenger left the vacuum of space on April 14, 1958, burning up in the outer atmosphere.
It was not until 1998 and the collapse of the Soviet tower of lies, that Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists who had trained the dog, was free to speak his mind. "Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us", he said, "We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. We shouldn't have done it…We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog".
Afterward
As a dog lover, I feel the need to add a more upbeat postscript, to this thoroughly depressing story.
"Belka" and "Strelka" spent a day in space aboard Sputnik 5 on August 19, 1960, and returned safely to Earth. The first Earth-born creatures to go into orbit and return alive.
Strelka later gave birth to six puppies, fathered by "Pushok", a dog who'd participated in
Charlie, (l) and Pushinka, (r)
ground-based space experiments, but never flew. Nikita Khrushchev gave "Pushinka", one of the puppies, to President John F. Kennedy in 1961.
Pushinka and a Kennedy dog named "Charlie" conducted their own Cold War rapprochement, resulting in four puppies. Pups that JFK jokingly referred to as "pupniks". Pushinka's descendants are still living, to this day.
Pushinka and her "pupniks", enjoying a moment on the White House lawn
Author Cape Cod CurmudgeonPosted on April 14, 2017 April 14, 2017 Categories Dogs, Exploration, Politics & Government, Russian History, Science & TechnologyTags History, Laika, Space Race, Sputnik4 Comments on April 14, 1958 Laika
April 11, 1970 Houston, We've had a Problem
For four days and nights, the three-man crew lived aboard the cramped, freezing Aquarius, a landing module intended to support a crew of 2 for only 1½ days
Jack Swigert was supposed to be the backup pilot for the Command Module, (CM), officially joining the Apollo 13 mission only 48 hours earlier, when prime crew member Ken Mattingly was exposed to German measles. Jim Lovell was the world's most traveled astronaut, a veteran of two Gemini missions and Apollo 8. By launch day, April 11, 1970, Lovell had racked up 572 space flight hours. For Fred Haise, former backup crew member on Apollo 8 and 11, this would be his first spaceflight.
The seventh manned mission in the Apollo space program was intended to be the third moon landing, launching at 13:13 central standard time, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The Apollo spacecraft comprised two separate vessels, separated by an airtight hatch. The crew lived in the Command/Service module, called "Odyssey". The Landing Module (LM) "Aquarius", would perform the actual moon landing.
56 hours into the mission and 5½ hours from the Moon's sphere of gravitational influence, Apollo crew members had just finished a live TV broadcast. Haise was powering the LM down while Lovell stowed the TV camera. Mission Control asked Swigert to activate stirring fans in the SM hydrogen and oxygen tank. Two minutes later, the astronauts heard a "loud bang".
Spacecraft manufacturing and testing had both missed an exposed wire in an oxygen tank. When Swigert flipped the switch for that routine procedure, a spark set the oxygen tank on fire. Alarm lights lit up all over Odyssey and in Mission Control. The spacecraft shuddered as one oxygen tank tore itself apart and damaged another. Power began to fluctuate. Attitude control thrusters fired, and communications temporarily went dark. The crew could not have known it at the time, but the entire Sector 4 panel had just blown off.
The movie takes creative license with Commander James Lovell saying "Houston, we have a problem". On board the real Apollo 13 it was Jack Swigert who spoke, saying "Houston, we've had a problem".
205,000 miles into deep space with life support systems shutting down, the Lunar Module became the only means of survival. There was no telling if the explosion had damaged Odyssey's heat shields, but it didn't matter. For now, the challenge was to remain, alive. Haise and Lovell frantically worked to boot up Aquarius, while Swigert shut down systems aboard Odyssey, in order to preserve power for splashdown.
This situation had been suggested during an earlier training simulation, but had been considered unlikely. As it happened, the accident would have been fatal without access to the Lunar Module.
For four days and nights, the three-man crew lived aboard the cramped, freezing Aquarius, a landing module intended to support a crew of 2 for only 1½ days. Heat fell close to freezing and food became inedible, as mission control teams, spacecraft manufacturers and the crew itself worked around the clock to jury rig life support, navigational and propulsion systems. This "lifeboat" would have to do what it was never intended to do.
Atmospheric re-entry alone, presented almost insurmountable challenges. The earth's atmosphere is a dense fluid medium. If you reenter at too steep an angle, you may as well be jumping off a high bridge. As it is, the human frame can withstand deceleration forces no higher than 12 Gs, equivalent to 12 individuals identical to yourself, piled on top of you. Even at that, you're only going to survive a few minutes, at best.
Left to right: Commander, James A. Lovell Jr., Command Module pilot, John L. Swigert Jr., Lunar Module pilot, Fred W. Haise Jr.
We all know what it is to skip a stone off the surface of a pond. If you hit the atmosphere at too shallow an angle, the result is identical. There is no coming down a second time. You get one bounce and then nothing but the black void of space.
For four days, most of the country and much of the world held its breath, waiting for the latest update from newspaper and television news. With communications down, TV commentators used models and illustrations, to describe the unfolding drama. Onboard Odyssey, power was so low that voice-only transmissions became difficult. Visual communications with Mission Control were as impossible, as the idea that the stranded astronauts could walk home.
As Odyssey neared earth, engineers and crew jury-rigged a means of jettisoning the spent Service Module, to create enough separation for safe re-entry.
One last problem to be solved, was the crew's final transfer from Lunar Module back to Command Module, prior to re-entry. With the "reaction control system" dead, University of Toronto engineers had only slide rules and six hours, in which to devise a way to "blow" the LM, by pressurizing the tunnel connecting it with the CM. Too much pressure might damage the hatch and its seal, too little wouldn't provide enough separation between the two bodies. The result of either failure, would have been identical to that of the "shooting stars", you see at night.
Apollo 13 after it came back to Earth.
By this time the Command Module had been in "cold soak" for days. No one even knew for certain, if the thing would come back to life.
Crashing into the atmosphere at over 24,000mph, the capsule had 14 minutes in which to come to a full stop, splashing down in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. External temperatures on the CM reached 2,691° F, as the kinetic energy of re-entry was converted to heat.
The Apollo 13 mission ended safely with splashdown southeast of American Samoa on April 17, 1970, at 18:07:41 local time. Exhausted and hungry, the entire crew had lost weight. Haise had developed a kidney infection. Total duration was 142 hours, 54 minutes and 41 seconds.
Author Cape Cod CurmudgeonPosted on April 11, 2017 April 9, 2017 Categories American History, Aviation, Exploration, Popular Culture, Science & TechnologyTags Apollo, History, Houston, NASA3 Comments on April 11, 1970 Houston, We've had a Problem
March 7, 1912 The Heroic Age of Polar Exploration
The final camp became their tomb, a high cairn of snow erected over it. Ship's carpenters built a wooden cross, inscribed with a line from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem Ulysses: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield".
RV Belgica frozen in the ice, 1898
The fourth son of a family of Norwegian shipowners and captains, Roald Amundsen always wanted to go to sea. His mother wanted no such thing and made him promise he'd go to school to become a doctor. Amundsen was 21 when his mother died. He kept his promise until that day. There would be no more school after that.
Amundsen wanted to become an explorer, taking inspiration from the doomed Franklin Arctic Expedition of 1848, and Fridtjof Nansen's crossing of Greenland in 1888.
It's been called the "Heroic Age" of polar exploration. Amundsen was drawn to it as much as he helped create it. He was part of the Antarctic expedition of 1897-99 aboard the RV Belgica, the first to winter in Antarctica. He led the first expedition to successfully navigate Canada's Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, in 1903–06.
Amundsen's attempt to reach the South Pole set out on September 8, 1911. Using skis and dog sleds, Amundsen and his men created supply depots at 80°, 81° and 82° south, along a direct line to the Pole. The effort proved to be premature and had to be abandoned due to extreme cold. A second attempt departed on October 19 with four sledges and 52 dogs, along the previously unknown Axel Heiberg Glacier. The team of five men and 16 dogs arrived at 90° 0′ S on December 14, 1911, the first team in history to reach the South Pole.
Amundsen expedition plants the Norwegian flag on the South Pole, December 14, 1911.
English explorer Robert Falcon Scott had attempted the South Pole in 1901–04, and was doing so once again in 1911. Though he'd had to turn back, the earlier expedition had established the southernmost record for that time, at 88° 23′ S. 97 miles short of the pole.
Routes taken by Scott (green) and Amundsen (red) expeditions to the South Pole.
Weak, unacclimatized ponies slowed the depot-laying part of the Scott expedition, four horses dying of cold or having to be shot because they slowed the team. When Scott decided to locate "One-Ton Depot" 35 miles short of its planned location at 80°, expedition member Lawrence Oates warned "Sir, I'm afraid you'll come to regret not taking my advice."
Unlike the previous attempt, Scott made it this time, only to find that Amundsen's Norwegian expedition had beat him by five weeks. The anguish in Scott's diary entry for January 17, 1912, is clear: "The worst has happened"; "All the day dreams must go"; "Great God! This is an awful place".
Roald Amundsen returned safely and publicly announced his attainment of the South Pole on March 7, 1912.
The doomed Scott party used a string to take this "selfie", the day after becoming 2nd to reach the South Pole
Defeated, the five-man Scott party began the 800-mile, frozen slog back from the Pole on January 19. Team member Edgar Evans' condition was visibly deteriorating as early as the 23rd. A bad fall on Beardmore Glacier on February 4 left him "dull and incapable". Another fall on the 17th left him dead at the foot of the glacier.
Dog teams failed to materialize at the appointed time. By March 16, Lawrence Oates was severely frostbitten. He left his tent for the last time, saying "I am just going outside and may be some time". He never returned.
The last three made their final camp on March 19, with 400 miles to go. A howling blizzard descended on camp the following day and lasted for days, as Scott and his companions wrote good-bye letters to mothers, wives, and others. The last words in his diary, were: "Last entry. For God's sake look after our people".
The frozen corpses of Scott and his comrades were found 8 months later, the last diary entry dated March 29, 1912. A high cairn of snow was erected over it all, that final camp becoming their tomb. Ship's carpenters built a wooden cross, inscribing on it the names of those lost: Scott, Edward Wilson, Henry Bowers, Lawrence Oates and Edgar Evans. A line from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, Ulysses, appears on the cross: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield".
They were eleven miles from their next supply depot.
Satellites measured the coldest temperature in recorded history on August 10, 2010 at −93.2 °C (−135.8 °F), in East Antarctica. The Amundsen-Scott weather station at the South Pole reports the average daily temperature for March, at -50.3°C (-58.54°F). A century of ice and snow have covered bodies, camp and the cross alike. Now encased 75′ down in the Ross Ice Shelf and inching their way outward, the bodies are expected to reach the Ross Sea sometime around 2276, perhaps to float away in an iceberg.
In 1926, Amundsen and a team of 15 reached the North Pole in the airship Norge. Three previous claims to have attained the North Pole: Frederick Cook (1908), Robert Peary (1909), and Richard E. Byrd (1926), have all been disputed as being of dubious accuracy or downright frauds, leaving Amundsen the undisputed first to have reached both poles.
The Observation Hill cross memorial to the Scott expedition, erected 1913.
On hearing the details of Scott's end, Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen is quoted as saying "I would gladly forgo any honour or money if thereby I could have saved Scott his terrible death".
He and a crew of five disappeared into the Arctic on June 18, 1928, lost in the search for survivors following the crash of the Airship Italia. Despite efforts to find them as late as August 2009, neither aircraft nor bodies were ever found.
Peter Markham Scott, the only child produced by the marriage of Robert Falcon and Kathleen Bruce Scott, went on to found the World Wide Fund for Nature, which operates to this day as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
"I may say that this is the greatest factor—the way in which the expedition is equipped—the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck". — The South Pole, by Roald Amundsen
Author Cape Cod CurmudgeonPosted on March 6, 2017 March 7, 2017 Categories British History, European History, ExplorationTags Arctic Exploration, Heroic Age, History, North Pole, South Pole1 Comment on March 7, 1912 The Heroic Age of Polar Exploration
December 13, 1577 El Draque
Historians argue whether this was a voyage of exploration, of piracy, or merely an effort to poke the Spanish King Phillip II in the eye
The "Pelican" left Plymouth, England on November 15, 1577, with four other ships and 164 men. The weather was so rotten that they soon had to turn back, seeking shelter in Falmouth, before finally returning to Plymouth, where they started. The flotilla set out again on December 13 after making repairs, soon to be joined by a sixth ship, the captured Portuguese merchant ship Santa Maria, renamed "Mary".
Historians argue whether this was a voyage of exploration, of piracy, or merely an effort to poke the Spanish King Phillip II in the eye. Before it was over, Sir Francis Drake would be the first to circumnavigate the globe in continuous command of the expedition.
He was the third, actually, depending on how you count them. Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan set out with 5 ships and 250 men back in 1519, becoming the first about 58 years earlier. Magellan himself didn't make it though, he died in the Battle of Mactan on a Philippine beach, in 1521. 19 men and a single ship under the command of Juan Sebastián Elcano, was all that remained on the expedition's return in 1522.
The Spanish explorer García Jofre de Loaísa was the second, leaving in 1525 with 450 men on seven ships. None of his ships ever made it back. 25 of his men would return in 1536, under Portuguese guard.
Drake had crossed the Atlantic and made it to Patagonia, when it seems one of his captains got on his last nerve. Thomas Doughty had been in command of the Mary, when he caught Drake's brother Thomas stealing from the vessel's cargo. One thing led to another and Doughty found himself accused as "a conjurer and a seditious person". He was brought before a shipboard trial for treason and witchcraft, establishing the idea that lasts to this day, that a ship's captain is its absolute ruler, regardless of the rank or social class of that ship's passengers.
Doughty lost his head, in the end, in the shadow of the weathered and sun bleached skeletons and the bleak, Spanish gibbets where Magellan had put his own mutineers to death, a half century earlier.
Golden Hind Replica
It may have been to smooth over the Doughty episode, that Drake renamed his flagship the "Golden Hind", (a female deer of 3 years or more), after the coat of arms of Sir Christopher Hatton, one of the expedition's prime sponsors. Soon reduced to three ships, Drake made the straits of Magellan by August of 1578, emerging alone into the Pacific in September.
Drake captured a Spanish ship laden with 25,000 pesos of Peruvian gold near Lima, when he heard about the galleon Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, sailing west toward Manila. Nicknamed "Cacafuego", translating as "Fireshitter" (I wouldn't make that up), the ship carried 80 pounds of gold, a golden crucifix, jewels, 13 chests full of "royals of plate" (silver coins) and 26 tons of silver. It was the richest prize of the voyage.
After a fine dinner with Cacafuego's captured officers and gentlemen passengers, Drake offloaded his captives, each with a gift appropriate to his rank, and a letter of safe conduct.
Drake landed near Alta, California in June 1579, where he repaired and restocked his vessel. He claimed the land for the English Crown, calling it Nova Albion: "New Britain". The precise location was carefully guarded to keep it secret from the Spanish, who by this time had a bounty of 20,000 ducats ($6.5 million in today's money) on the head of "El Draque".
The Golden Hind sailed into Plymouth, England with Drake and 59 remaining crew onboard, on September 26, 1580. The half share owed to the queen surpassed the crown's income for the entire year. Drake himself was hailed as the first Englishman to circumnavigate the earth.
Drake's seafaring career ended in January 1596, when he died of dysentery, anchored off the central American coast. There he was dressed in his armor and buried at sea in a lead coffin, off the Portobelo District of Panama. Divers search for his coffin, to this day.
Author Cape Cod CurmudgeonPosted on December 13, 2016 January 14, 2017 Categories British History, European History, Exploration, Wars and Military Conflicts, World HistoryTags Circumnavigation, History, Sir Francis Drake1 Comment on December 13, 1577 El Draque