Belated Birthday Greetings

I really should get one of those birthday calendars. I missed a couple lately.

First of all, Valentina Tereshkova, the first Soviet woman in space, was 70 last month. There’s a little commemorative photo album at RIA Novosti. On her return to earth, Valentina married another famous Russian cosmonaut, Andriyan Nikolayev. Whether this was role model propaganda or an office romance, we don’t really know.

It would have been perfect if the heroic Soviet family had a pet cosmodog too, like Laika, but the first dog in space could not be returned to earth and died in orbit. Naturally this was kept a state secret for many years.

Then last week, April 12, was Cosmonauts Day. It’s interesting to remember that, in the Sixties, press coverage in the US wasn’t as warm as in the USSR.

When Russia launched the first sputnik, America was horrified. What frightened U.S. scientists was its weight – 184 pounds. The U.S. space program was working on satellites that only weighed a fraction of that. The satellite’s weight implied that the Soviets had advanced rockets that might be able to carry a nuclear weapon thousands of miles.

Publicly, to belittle the Soviet technology, military leaders said ‘anyone could launch a hunk of iron‘. Privately, they admitted that achievement was then beyond the dreams of US scientists.

Americans didn’t like the idea of those dogs in space either, and Laika (who actually was a stray) was nicknamed ‘Muttnik’. America produced its own cheeky version of the commemorative stamps. But the thought of Russian nuclear spaceships soon had the US launching chimps and monkeys in an effort to catch up in the race. After all, Russia might one day just drop nukes on the US from the Space Cities they were building.

The US space chimps were never as famous as the Russian dogs but they are celebrated on another good timewasting page, Animal Astronauts.