32 | New Scientist | 3 October 2020
Film
Space Dogs
Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter
Available for streaming on MubiA RUSSIAN dog named Laika was
the first living creature to orbit
Earth. This fact is so well known
as to scarcely need stating, but in
becoming trivia, the ambition and
brutality of the early Soviet space
age experiment she was part of
have been lost.
Space Dogs, a documentary
with a limited streaming release
in the UK in September and
October, attempts to expand our
perspective of this chapter in
history to include a dog’s-eye view.
Laika died shortly after launch
in November 1957, her body
circling the Earth in Sputnik 2
“like some cosmic flotsam”, says
actor Aleksei Serebryako, who
contributes the film’s occasional
narration in Russian.
The craft she perished in burnt
up as expected on re-entering the
atmosphere in April 1958, though
according to legend, Laika’s ghost
returned to Earth.
This new take on her story
combines archive material from
the Soviet era with footage of
modern-day strays in Moscow to
invoke what Laika’s life might have
been like before she was forcibly
recruited into the test programme.
Directed by Elsa Kremser and
Levin Peter, the documentary is
light on narrative and exposition,
instead presenting, sometimes
whimsically, the street dogs as
Laika’s descendants, dreaming
of the space exploration that was
ultimately her doom.
At times, the camera quietlyA street dog named Laika
Space Dogs follows the story of the stray who was the first living thing to
orbit Earth, providing a canine-eye view for the first time, writes Elle Huntaccompanies the dogs as they
chew parked cars, forge alliances,
see off threats and otherwise roam
the city with apparent purpose.
This dream-like atmosphere is
punctured by sudden bursts of
high energy and aggression, true
to the life of a stray.
The film mirrors this with
footage of the experiments on
the space dogs that came after
Laika, conducted in part as a
result of her perceived “success”.
Indeed, the Soviet Union
publicly maintained she was alive
for several days after her flight
and died humanely as planned.
Only in 2002 did new research
establish that she had perished
just hours after launch.
Peter and Kremser have
said they sought to show the
“bitterness” in the relationship
between dogs and humans. The
film’s canine take does cast a new
light on these scenes from the lab,
showing dogs strapped into a
centrifuge or draped in wires,
visibly trembling.Views Culture
RA
UMZE
ITFILMorbit Earth and return alive were
Strelka and Belka in 1960, with
Strelka’s puppies later presented
as proof that it was possible for
living things to thrive after a
stint in orbit.
It was certainly a crude
public relations ploy – but the
presentation in Space Dogs of
Strelka’s mating as a sinister
plot to produce the “first cosmic
children” demonstrates the
film-makers’ readiness to
deploy their creative licence.
If the aim was to show how
the space dogs were mistreated or
reveal Russia’s embrace of Laika as
a self-serving source of national
pride, more structure and facts
would have been effective.
Instead, Space Dogs adds to
the mythology – though, of the
reductive and the romantic
interpretations of Laika’s story,
it may come the closest of any
to offering a canine perspective. ❚Elle Hunt is a freelance
writer based in LondonBut Space Dogs is essayistic in
scope to the point of obscuring
facts, such as in its assertion about
its canine subjects that “after
weeks in stifling darkness, only a
few dogs returned to Earth alive”.
In attempting to create an
exhaustive list of orbital and
suborbital flights of the Sovietspace dog programme, Animals
in Space authors Colin Burgess
and Chris Dubbs were thwarted
by incomplete and inconsistent
record-keeping.
Their best estimate was that
dogs were launched into space
71 times from 1951 to 1966 and
there were 17 deaths.
Of the dozens of dogs that the
USSR sent into space, only Laika’s
death was a certainty. The first toThe unwanted mutts of
Moscow paved the way
for the first cosmonauts
“ The film invokes
what Laika’s life
might have been like
before she was forced
into the space race”