A fresh wave of anxiety rippled through the Pentagon, the White House, and the American public when the Soviets sent Sputnik 2 into orbit on November 3, 1957. After all, barely a month had passed since the launch of Sputnik had kicked off the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States. The roots of space exploration in the 1950s traced back to 1945, when the United States military claimed technological spoils of war from Germany. The Soviet Union had its eye on that same technology, but arrived too late. So when Soviet rockets began carrying dogs as passengers into space just 12 years after World War Two ended, the world—and especially the United States military—paid very close attention.
Laika's One-Way Flight Into Space
A stray dog roaming the streets of Moscow was selected by officials who believed a homeless animal would be better equipped to endure the brutal cold of space. They gave her the name Laika and subjected her to rigorous training for what was, in truth, a suicide mission—there was never a plan to bring her back. The goal was to observe how long she could survive while Sputnik 2 circled the planet. Inside her small capsule, she had enough food and water to last seven days, along with an oxygen scrubber designed to absorb CO2. The full story of Laika's groundbreaking journey, however, wouldn't emerge until decades later. Sputnik 2 completed roughly 2,500 orbits around the earth before it tumbled back through the atmosphere and burned up during reentry in April 1958.
Today, Laika stands as a largely forgotten hero of the space race. She should have survived for at least seven days, at a minimum. Yet reports indicate that extreme temperature exposure claimed her life after just four orbits, only hours into the flight. Still, her sacrifice yielded something profoundly important. The data proved a critical point—if Laika and other small animals could be launched into space and survive, then so could a monkey, and ultimately, a human being. On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy made the bold promise that the U.S. would put people on the moon by the decade's end.