Plans to set up a settlement on the moon are well on their way, The Boss tells me, after the Artemis mission ended successfully with its Orion capsule splashing down off California earlier in the week.
NASA says it will follow up with another unmanned orbit next year, followed by astronauts setting up camp on the moon in 2025. It’s a long break between visits – a dozen men have walked on the moon, but the last one was on Apollo 17, in 1972, so the campsite will need some tidying.
The Boss hopes that awkward flag the Americans had to prop up — there being no breeze on the moon — will have fallen over. He thinks the moon belongs to everyone, to willy wagtails and young lovers everywhere. And to dogs, who have howled at the moon before people could walk on two legs. The first moon settlement demands a first dog.
Now, there’s a feller who calls himself First Dog on the Moon already — you may have heard of him. He’s a cartoonist from Tassie, which shouldn’t be held against him. There’s a lot of fine things that come from Tassie, according to The Boss, but none that appeal to me.
I like to think First Dog on the Moon is a salute to Laika, the stray mongrel the Russians press-ganged from the streets of Moscow to become the first dog in space. Laika never got near the moon, but she will forever hold line honours for bravery, tackling a space orbit before any human dared to.
Not that she had much say in it. She was seduced by lashings of good food, a new delight for a scavenger dog. You might think sourcing a mongrel off the street mirrors the novel approach Mr Putin takes today, offering prisoners and vagabonds the non-negotiable opportunity to die for glory on the frontlines in Ukraine.
But The Boss says the Soviet space scientists figured stray dogs were better prepared for extreme cold, having survived Moscow’s winters on the streets.
They had learned from using other dogs in high-altitude tests that the dogs needed to be comfortable in a confined space, with noise and vibrations around them, so they prepared Laika with 20 days of training. Three days of it were spent sitting in the capsule before take-off, on November 3, 1957.
What they failed to tell her was that the technology for de-orbit hadn’t been sorted yet. The first dog at high altitude, Albina, had been returned safely — but President Khrushchev wanted the more ambitious space launch on the 40th anniversary of the Russian revolution, so they hurried the project and gave up on plans for re-entry.
The Soviet scientists had hoped to euthanise Laika with a serving of poisoned food after six days. With the same light-hearted view of the truth to which we have become accustomed, the Russians claimed, for many years, that Laika had died either from asphyxia, when the batteries failed, or that she had been euthanised.
Some 45 years later, in October 2002, Dimitri Malashenkov, one of the scientists behind the Sputnik 2 mission, admitted that Laika had died before the fourth orbit of the Earth, seven hours after take-off, from overheating in the capsule.
So I won’t be heading to the moon with the Russians: I will wait to be offered the position by a more reputable space line. And I’ll be thinking of little Laika. But now The Boss says he wants to come with me — he wants to see an Earthrise too. Woof!
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