Happy April 12th, the Space Flight Day!

[SiberianTiger]

April 12, 1961

April 12, 1981

And let's not forget those who died to pave the way for the Humanity...

 

[Andy44]

Everytime I see Laika I think of the 1960 headline in the Onion's book Our Dumb Century:

"Soviet Space Program Ahead in Dog-Killing Race"

This is funny, too: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47977

 

[Brad]

the Onion's book Our Dumb Century:

"Soviet Space Program Ahead in Dog-Killing Race"

The Onion should be required in doctrinal education for all capitalist.

 

[SiberianTiger]

Everytime I see Laika I think of the 1960 headline in the Onion's book Our Dumb Century:

"Soviet Space Program Ahead in Dog-Killing Race"

This is funny, too: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47977

Maybe it's so, but is anybody minding to build a monument to the monkeys who perished in preparation of the US manned space flight program?

 

[Andy44]

Not that I know of. They're just chimps. Besides, I didn't know any died?

 

[tblaxland]

Not that I know of. They're just chimps. Besides, I didn't know any died?

Chimps no, but there's quite a list of monkeys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeys_in_space#United_States

 

[Andy44]

Wow, that's a lot of dead monkeys.

 

[SiberianTiger]

Not that I know of. They're just chimps. Besides, I didn't know any died?

Unfortunately, many did. I read a paper article about it; right now I can only provide a Wikipedia reference to that informaion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeys_in_space

The animal flight turn in this topic makes me pull a magazine out of my shelf and translate the following piece of interview of Professor Seryapin from the Military Medicine Institute, who was charged with animal test flights at the dawn of the space era:

- Alexander Dmitrievich, please tell as the story of BMB? Who invented that name for the dog that flew to space without any preparations and returned to Earth in fine shape?

- The name was devised by O.G. Ivanovsky... And the story itself was such. It happened in 1951. We were going to do a last launch in series, and something was still wrong with the rocket. In the assembly building our engineers were busy with the vehicle. They said that fixing problems will take no less than three days. Korolev ordered to stay only those who are immediately busy supporting the launch and the rest to go home. We had people from all the Union: Kiev, Kharkov, Leningrad...

We, the medics, had our own airplane. We took all our test animals by this plane to Moscow. The only ones who stayed were me, Yazdovsky and two test dogs: one that never flew (can't remember the name quite well, possibly Rozhok/Little Horn) and Smeliy/Brave Guy did fly before.

There were some ground tests that day... Usually, a soldier aired the dogs in the evening, and did so without any dog-leads. The doggies were adapted for the environment and never ran away. But on that day, Smeliy has suddenly fleed into Steppes. The soldier tried to catch him or persuade to come back, all in vain... We had to undertake a chase in cars, raised a helicopter, but the night fell quickly and we've been unable to find the dog... What could we do? Korolev and Blagonravov (the chairman of the State Commission) had been in Stalingrad at that moment, they had an urgent call to the local Party Commitee. How would we report them that only one dog had left?

But that soldier, who turned out to be a smart guy, proposed us: "What if we just take another dog? We have so many of them near our cantina". And we realized that if we would take a random dog and it would die on the mission, while our prepared one would survive, we'd be able to say: look, we prepared our dogs fine for survival, and this one was not prepared, a test article. And in case it would survive, everything would be just fine as well. We'd say: why put so much effort in preparing the dogs while they can go to space with no prepping? It was a brilliant idea!

Yazdovsky told me to action - I wore a coat and ran to than cantina together with the soldier. There we've caught a puppy of about the same size and mass we had. Carried him back, washed him. Shaved in the places where the sensors would have to be attached to. And it was such a nice dog, never protested against anything, just licking hands. We fed him with sausage and sugar and told the soldier to keep mum about the matter.

And then, a time for launch off Kapustin Yar has come. All launches usually happened before dawn. Early in the morning, we took our animals to the launch spot, about 20 kilometres away. As soon as we came, we were met by Ivanovsky. Suddenly, he noticed and told me: "Listen up, what dog is this?" They all knew our dogs that were going to fly there. We had to give the story away and asked nicely not to tell anybody else. He waived it away: "It's your business. If an extra corpse will parachute down, you will bury it yourself. Do what you want".

During the launch, we were shaking in our trenches. Then we have seen the container coming down, and rushed there. The first thing I did was looking inside with a great deal of fear: and there were the dogs, both of them alive! I opened the door, released them, grabbed our puppy... At that moment, cars came in. Korolev walked out from one and asked me out of the blue: "Which dog is this? What's the name?" I stood there, holding the dog in my hands and couldn't say a word, because we had never bothered to invent a name for him.

Finally, I managed to murmur in reply: "You know, Sergey Pavlovich..." And then, Ivanovsky has intervened and said: "Its name is BMB!" - "What does it mean, a BMB?" - "Backup of the Missing Buddy!" Such way we had to tell the full story.