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Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakh SSR
69 years ago

On November 3, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2 carrying a small mixed-breed dog named Laika, picked up as a stray on the streets of Moscow. She became the first living creature to orbit the Earth. The spacecraft had no system for returning to the ground, and everyone involved knew before launch that the dog would not be coming back.

The mission had been ordered in a hurry. Sputnik 1 had gone up on October 4 and stunned the world, and Nikita Khrushchev wanted a follow-up spectacular in time for the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on November 7. The engineers had about three weeks. Sergei Korolev's team designed and built a pressurized capsule with a feeding system, a fan, and sensors in that window. Strays were used because the programme's doctors believed animals that had survived Moscow winters on the street would tolerate hunger, cold, and stress better than pets.

Laika was selected from a group of candidates and trained by being confined in progressively smaller cages, spun in centrifuges, and exposed to the noise of launch. One of the scientists on the programme, Vladimir Yazdovsky, took her home to play with his children shortly before the flight, writing later that he wanted to do something nice for the dog because she had so little time left.

The official Soviet account for decades was that Laika had survived several days in orbit and had been painlessly put down, or had died when her oxygen ran out. The truth emerged in 2002, when the scientist Dmitri Malashenkov presented evidence that she had died within hours of launch, from overheating caused by a thermal control failure and by part of the rocket remaining attached to the capsule. Telemetry showed her pulse racing during ascent and taking far longer than expected to return to normal.

The flight produced real data: it demonstrated that a mammal could survive launch acceleration and weightlessness, which was a necessary step toward sending a person. Yuri Gagarin flew less than four years later. It also produced an immediate international backlash, particularly in Britain, where animal welfare organizations protested outside Soviet offices. The ethics of the mission were debated inside the Soviet programme too. Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists who had selected and trained her, said decades afterward that the work had not been justified by what they learned, and that he regretted it. A monument including Laika's figure was unveiled in Moscow in 2008, near the facility where she was prepared for the flight.

Laika was a stray picked up in Moscow, trained in three weeks, and launched on November 3, 1957, aboard a spacecraft with no way of coming down. The official story said she lived several days. She died within hours from overheating. One of the men who chose her said later that the science had not been worth it.

How much do you know about Laika, how quickly Sputnik 2 was built, what actually happened during the flight, and the reaction it provoked?