On this day in 1957 – the Soviet Union launches Sputnik 2. On board is the first animal to enter orbit, a dog named Laika.

37 comments

  1. Laika (Russian: Лайка; c. 1954 – 3 November 1957) was a Soviet space dog who became the first animal to orbit the Earth, paving the way for human spaceflight during the upcoming years.

    Laika, a stray mongrel from the streets of Moscow, was selected to be the occupant of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 that was launched into low orbit on 3 November 1957.

    No capacity for her recovery and survival was planned, and she died of overheating or asphyxiation.

    [More about Laika and the mission](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/sad-story-laika-space-dog-and-her-one-way-trip-orbit-1-180968728/).

  2. Or first DEATH in the Soviet space program (although this one by design).

    Will probably never know the actual number because they hid failures at the time, but bear in mind life is cheap in Russia

  4. Isn’t it a bit ironical that the first mammal in space was a random bitch from Moscow?

  10. Correction: The first animal to enter orbit was a triceratops named Donald in the Chicxulub event. Donald was a pioneer.

  13. Early space flights experiments had a lot of animal victims. Mice, rats, some dogs and a lot of monkeys died in both US and in Russia. This extract is from Wikipedia about the monkey experiments from US.

    [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeys_and_apes_in_space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeys_and_apes_in_space)

    “*The first primate astronaut was Albert, a rhesus macaque, who on June 11, 1948, rode to over 63 km (39 mi) on a V-2 rocket. Albert died of suffocation during the flight.[1][2][3]*

    *Albert was followed by Albert II, who survived the V-2 flight but died on impact on June 14, 1949, after a parachute failure.[2] Albert II became the first monkey and the first primate in space as his flight reached 134 km (83 mi) – past the Kármán line of 100 km taken to designate the beginning of space.[4] Albert III died at 35,000 feet (10.7 km) in an explosion of his V2 on September 16, 1949. Albert IV, on the last monkey V-2 flight, died on impact on December 8 that year after another parachute failure.[2] His flight reached 130.6 km. Alberts, I, II, and IV were rhesus macaques while Albert III was a crab-eating macaque.*

    *Monkeys later flew on Aerobee rockets. On April 18, 1951, a monkey, possibly called Albert V, died due to parachute failure. Yorick, also called Albert VI, along with 11 mouse crewmates, reached 236,000 ft (72 km, 44.7 mi) and survived the landing, on September 20, 1951, the first monkey to do so (the dogs Dezik and Tsygan had survived a trip to space in July of that year), although he died 2 hours later. Two of the mice also died after recovery; all of the deaths were thought to be related to stress from overheating in the sealed capsule in the New Mexico sun while awaiting the recovery team.[2] Albert VI’s flight surpassed the 50-mile boundary the U.S. used for spaceflight but was below the international definition of space. Patricia and Mike, two cynomolgus monkeys, flew on May 21, 1952, and survived, but their flight was only to 26 kilometers.[citation needed]*

    *On December 13, 1958, Gordo, also called Old Reliable, a squirrel monkey, survived being launched aboard Jupiter AM-13 by the US Army.[4] After flying for over 1,500 miles and reaching a height of 310 miles (500 km) before returning to Earth, Gordo landed in the South Atlantic and was killed due to mechanical failure of the parachute recovery system in the rocket nose cone.[4]”*

    I do not really know how I feel about this. Those were dangerous times in the early development of space flight and the scale of destruction that we do to other mammals dwarfs the deaths on these experiments. A lot of animals have been killed by cosmetics industry in painful lab experiments. *”According to PETA, over 100 million animals (including mice, rats, dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, monkeys, fish, and birds) are killed in US laboratories alone each year. A great number of those animals are tested on in the making of beauty products.” Source:* [*https://www.unsustainablemagazine.com/animal-testing-in-the-beauty-industry/*](https://www.unsustainablemagazine.com/animal-testing-in-the-beauty-industry/)

  16. This history touched me so much when I was a child. I’m glad that experiments with animals are getting less traumatic over time.

  17. I named my pet dog, Laika, a stray mongrel from the streets of Chennai.

    Unlike the original legend, mine likes to eat, sleep, bark and repeat.

  18. that poor creature would have been better off roaming the streets and doing what made her happy…poor baby it must have been frightening to end up where she did ..and all alone…The thoughtless cruelty 💔

  23. I will never not feel sad for Laika.

    I think if someone ever made a talking dog movie about Laika, following her tragic journey, it’d be a movie that would probably make people feel suicidal by the end of it.

  30. Knowing the soviets I’m surprised they didn’t jump straight to sending humans. It wouldn’t surprise me if this story was faked and they really sent someone out of gulag

  32. Actually, heavily selected and trained Laika escaped few some 1-2 days before the launch. The space station area had a lot of stray dogs, so they just picked one stray that looked like Laika, and that doggie went to space.

    Of course, that was all too embarrassing for the Soviet space program to report, and also good news for the real Laika, living somewhere happily, without being that dog skeleton in orbit.

  37. My sweet rescue is named Laika after this dog. I made a doggy Cosmonaut costume that she wears every year for Halloween

Leave a Reply