Guitars and rockets

[cajeme]

Hello everyone!<br /> After reading “Guitars and rockets” I find it very disturbing to think of Laika. It seems very clear what happened to her and I can no longer believe that she lasted even a few hours, given the stage of rocket development and the haste of the building process. Now more than ever there was no real justification for that kind of experiment, and I only hope that the ISS crew is not subject to new kinds of hazards or risks created by senseless ambition or projects.

 

[toothferry]

how do you know that Laika suffer from more noise than an average astronaut?

 

[thebigcat]

If you ever get a chance to read Tom Wolfe's seminal work <b>The Right Stuff</b> and IMHO everybody interested in space exploration should, you will learn about a chimp named Ham which had the fortune to be the first living creature to survive a trip into space and has something rather interesting in common with Cdr Alan Shepard. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[CalliArcale]

Laika died because of a failure of the temperature control system; she essentially baked to death. Not to get offtopic, but if you want to get an idea of how she suffered, lots of dogs die every year in much the same way when their owners leave them in their cars on hot days. <img src="/images/icons/frown.gif" /><br /><br />There were many other dogs sent on suborbital and orbital flights by the USSR. I don't recall finding any others who perished, so perhaps that can bring some relief.<br /><br />If you want a harrowing tale of animal spaceflight, read about the American Biosatellite 3 flown in 1969. This was a plan to orbit a male monkey named Bonnie for a full month. The mission was aborted after just over a week because Bonnie's health was failing. I'm not sure whether they were able to recover Bonnie alive. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>

 

[smythex]

Yes, but there was no provision to bring her back again, so she would have died from one cause or another eventually. <br /><br />