Back from Beyond

To the Soviet Union last week went honors for the most spectacular satellite achievement since Sputnik I: Russian scientists became the first to send living animals into space orbit and to recover them successfully.

The dramatic launching was dramatically announced. Into the hushed Moscow courtroom where the fate of U-2 Pilot Francis Powers was being deliberated rushed a Soviet official, with word that the U.S.S.R. had just orbited a 10,143-lb. animal-carrying satellite.

Russia's huge "flying zoo" was the heaviest object ever fired by man into space, more than twice the weight of Midas II, the biggest U.S. satellite. Aboard the bulky capsule as it spun around the earth in a near-perfect circular orbit were two dogs--named Strelka (Arrow) and

Belka (Squirrel)--rats, mice and flies, as well as land and water plants, fungi and seeds. U.S. engineers estimated that the multi-stage rocket that boosted this bizarre collection into space must have had a first-stage thrust of at least 800,000 lbs. --twice as much thrust as the most powerful U.S. missile possesses.*

Alive & Well. In their hermetically sealed cabins, equipped with air-purifying chemicals similar to those used in U.S. atomic submarines, spacesuit-clad Strelka and Belka lolled in a constant 77DEG temperature. Old space dogs (each of them had taken short rocket rides before), they stared at each other through a pane of glass and ate eagerly from an automatic feeding apparatus while instruments fastened to their bodies relayed their blood pressure, temperature, pulse and breathing rate back to earth. Strelka seemed to bear up better than Belka under the rigors of weightless space travel: her breathing rate remained at a steady 30 pants per minute, while Belka's dropped sharply to twelve. On the ground, excited Russian scientists clustered around a closed-circuit television screen; a camera inside the satellite followed the curious, white-haired space mutts in their tiny cells.

As the satellite circled the earth once every 90.6 min. at an altitude of 198.8 miles, its powerful radios broadcast its presence to listening stations all over the world. A ham radio operator in Cleveland tracked its course across the summer sky for a full eleven minutes. On its 18th pass around the world, an electronic command flashed up from earth, triggered rockets that altered the satellite's course and pointed it back toward earth. A quick blast from retrorockets slowed its descent, and a special thermal shield protected the satellite's skin against the heat generated by rapid descent through the earth's atmosphere. The capsule, with its canine passengers, was ejected automatically, floated down separately. Both satellite and capsule, said the Russians, landed astonishingly close--within 6.2 miles--to a pre-selected (but still secret) target area. Soviet physiologists rushed to the scene, hastily broke open the capsule and examined its inhabitants, pronounced them "alive and well." In a laboratory, the dogs munched jellied candy, the mice ate cookies and the flies buzzed angrily around the jars in which they had been imprisoned during flight. Said a Russian scientist: "We have crossed the threshold of manned space flight."

Maybe a Mack? Once again, in spectacular fashion, Russia had demonstrated its space prowess. Grumbled an envious U.S. scientist: "Next thing you know, they'll have a soccer team and a Mack truck up there." In England, Jodrell Bank's famed Astronomer Bernard Lovell flatly predicted that the Russians would put a man into space, "perhaps within a couple of months."

* The U.S.'s Atlas intercontinental missile has a first-stage thrust of 360,000 Ibs. In the works, but still years away from operational capacity: Saturn, a space-research vehicle that will have an initial thrust of 1,500,000 lbs., could boost a full crew of human astronauts into orbit.

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