What's Up With Veterok & Ugolyok

The announcement from the Soviet Union was characteristically terse. Two dogs had been blasted into orbit aboard the spaceship Cosmos 110 "to conduct biological tests." Beyond that the Russians said practically nothing. The intended length of the trip, the breed and sex of the dogs, the size and weight of the spacecraft, whether the experiment was concerned directly with travel to the moon or with lengthy earth orbit, whether an attempt would be made to bring the dogs back--all such matters remained a secret. Clearly the Russians were putting on the dogs to steal headlines from the Saturn IB launch, but beyond that Western experts were barely able to guess what was up with Veterok (Breeze) and Ugolyok (Little Lump of Coal). But they made an effort.

Moon Dogs? The "biological tests," it was assumed, were to check the effects of radiation on living tissue, one of the most plaguing problems of space travel. Because Cosmos 110, at its apogee, was taking its passengers higher (562 miles) into space than any man has ever been, Veterok and Ugolyok were passing regularly through the Van Allen radiation belt. U.S. experts who noted that the low perigee (116 miles) matched the perigee of earlier manned Russian shots decided that this could mean that an attempt would be made to recover the dogs after a trip that might last as long as a month.

One interesting, if currently unsolvable, mystery about the flight was its angle of inclination from the equator. Unlike the 65DEG slant invariably followed in cosmonaut flights, Cosmos 110 had a 51.9DEG inclination that did not take it nearly so far north and south. This might have been an attempt to avoid the hazards of an emergency landing in remote snowbound areas. The 51DEG angle, however, was also close to the angle that Russian moon shots have followed while in earth orbit, lending weight to the premise that Veterok and Ugolyok may be the immediate predecessors of the moon dogs the Russians have said they intend to send into lunar orbit ahead of man.

Since Pavlov. For all their guesses, Western experts knew from past experience that for any precise answers they would have to wait until the Russians were ready to release reliable data. Until then, no one could be sure that the angle of inclination, to say nothing of the perigee and apogee, represented more than a launch mistake or a guidance error. In fact, no one was even sure why Veterok and Ugolyok had been chosen for the voyage. Though dogs are perfectly satisfactory subjects, U.S. scientists plan this fall to orbit a biosatellite loaded with wasps and fruit flies, which react far more quickly and sensitively to radiation. Perhaps the reason for the choice of dogs was simply that ever since Pavlov the Russians have used dogs for everything.

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