Goodbye Pchelka

Somewhere in the Russian hinterland last week a giant rocket hurled aloft a five-ton spaceship containing two dogs named Pchelka (Little Bee) and Mushka (Little Fly), a quantity of other unspecified plants and animals, and myriad electronic gadgets for keeping radio tab on the passengers.

It was the third of its kind. The first, launched last May with a dummy astronaut aboard, went out of control and was not recovered. Cosmic Ship II, launched in August with animal passengers, was safely lowered to earth, and Nikita Khrushchev boasted that the launching was "a step to man's flight into space." To a newsman's question why Cosmic III weighed 82 Ibs. less than Cosmic II, Khrushchev replied: "It's big enough for a man to eat his dinner inside." It was also roughly twice the size of the biggest satellite that the U.S. has yet managed to fire into orbit.

But Cosmic III was soon in trouble. Allied trackers around the world noted that Cosmic Ill's original orbit (only 154.72 miles above the earth at its apogee, 111.94 miles at its perigee) was the lowest yet assumed by any satellite, Russian or American, and dangerously close to the upper atmosphere. After the spaceship had made 18 revolutions around the earth, U.S. and British trackers suddenly lost contact with it.

Hours later, Tass conceded that Cosmic III had gone astray. When the signal was given for the return of the spaceship satellite to earth, "the spaceship descended along a noncalculated trajectory" and "burned up on entering the dense layers of the atmosphere."

In the usual manner of space publicists, the Russian scientists insisted that, before the burnout, "the planned program" had been accomplished and "the information obtained yielded new data for manned space flight in the near future."

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