From Laika with Love: Secret Soviet Gifts to Apollo.
by Duane Graveline M.D.

Includes: "We Have a Fire in the Cockpit"
by Fred Kelly M.D.

This book reveals the extraordinary life and achievements of Duane Graveline, MD, MPH. A Vermont family doctor, aerospace medical research scientist, USAF flight surgeon and former NASA Scientist Astronaut, he now resides in Merritt Island, Florida, in sight of the Kennedy Space Centre.

In 1957, while Graveline was studying at Johns Hopkins University, the Soviet Union followed up their stunning earlier achievement of launching the first satellite into space by sending an instrumented research dog named Laika into orbit aboard Sputnik 2.

Becoming a flight surgeon and conducting space medical research was almost an inevitable career path for this young doctor with stars in his eyes, and he soon found himself in our super-secret Foreign Technology Division as an analyst for Soviet Bioastronautics.

During this time he was the flight surgeon who not only reviewed Laika's biotelemetry, but later that of cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov. His analysis team broke out the secret bio-data monitor that enabled the entire NASA tracking network to monitor the cosmonauts on Voskhod 2, at a time when the Soviets had amassed 292 manned orbits to our 31.

The author still has fond memories of those times, during which even the chief of the Soviet Bioastronautics, Dr. Oleg Gazenko, was his friend. He still is affiliated with the space program as a consultant on the life-threatening hazards of cosmic radiation that our astronauts face with their "return to the moon and on to Mars."

Special contribution by Dr. Fred Kelly, MD, a specialist in aerospace medicine, retired naval aviator and NASA flight surgeon who headed the medical panel of the accident board investigating the Apollo 1 pad fire that took the lives of three American astronauts.