During the early stages of the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States, soviet scientists began to experiment with dogs in order to design viable rocket to get men into space safely, leading to the development of the Vostok, which ultimately put the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space, after the flights of Laika, Belka and Strelka, Pchyolka and Mushka, Chernushka and Zvyozdochka deemed the craft ready for human flight.
But among these pioneering dogs, a couple whom died in almost complete obscurity would prove crucial into the development of one of the most important safety features ever put in a rocket, and the only one in the history of space flights that has managed to save lives, the Spacecraft Abort System, also known in the west as the launch escape system.
On the 28th of July 1960, space dogs Lisichka and Chayka were launched on board Sputnik-5-1, a Vostok 1K rocket, when 19 seconds into the flight, part of the first stage catastrophically failed, sending the craft back to earth where it would crash 38 seconds later, killing both dogs.
This accident would reveal a critical safety problem in all manned flights, that any launchpad explosion, or any engine failure immediately after launch would prove deadly to it’s occupants, since the ejection systems designed during the sub-orbital test flights would prove useless as they were incapable of getting the cosmonauts far enough from the explosion in time, not to mention they exposed them to the flames of their burning craft.
So with this accident in mind, the aforementioned Spacecraft Abort System was developed for the new generation of soviet manned rockets, the Soyuz, which consisted on a cluster of solid-fuel booster located atop the rocket, designed to separate the crew capsule from the rest of the rocket in the even of an explosion or engine failure, ensuring the capsule would clear the launchpad and land safely away from it, keeping its occupants safe.
This system would prove it’s worth for the first time on the 26th of September 1983, when Soyuz 7K-ST No.16L, a Soyuz mission intended to visit the Salyut 7 space station, caught fire on the launchpad before the countdown to launch was finished, forcing the activation of the launch escape system, which successfully saved the two cosmonauts involved in the accident, Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov.
And then once again 35 years later, when Soyuz MS-10, intended to transport two members of the Expedition 57 crew, Aleksey Ovchinin and Nick Hague, to the International Space Station, was aborted one minute into flight due to a booster failure, forcing the activation of the system which saved both men’s lives.
Showing that these two brave pooches helped save the lives of their fellow cosmonauts, proving that their deaths weren’t in vain.
German tank Pz. Kpfw V “Panther”, k.o. by SAU SU-85 under the command of Lieutenant Kravtsev. Ukraine, 1944. The photo was taken from the driver’s hatch.
