Barely a month after Sputnik 1 stunned the world, the USSR rushed a second satellite into space, this time carrying a passenger: a stray mongrel named Laika. Soviet engineers built the mission in under four weeks, with no plan to bring her home. Her death within hours of launch, from overheating, was concealed for decades, but her flight proved a living being could survive launch and weightlessness.
Laika was a street dog picked up in Moscow, chosen partly for her calm temperament and small size. Engineers fitted her into a padded, pressurized capsule wired with sensors to monitor her heartbeat, respiration, and blood pressure, feeding data back to ground stations. Soviet officials publicly claimed she survived about a week before a painless euthanasia via poisoned food; the truth, revealed in 2002 by a Russian scientist involved in the mission, was that a thermal control failure caused the cabin to overheat, killing her within five to seven hours of launch.
The mission was assembled with astonishing haste. Premier Nikita Khrushchev, delighted by the propaganda triumph of Sputnik 1, demanded a follow-up to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, giving designer Sergei Korolev's team barely four weeks to build a new payload from scratch. There was never a recovery system; Laika's death was built into the mission from the start.
Her flight, however brief and however grim, demonstrated that a mammal could endure the stresses of launch and orbital flight, data that fed directly into plans for human spaceflight. A statue of Laika stands near a Moscow military research facility today, commemorating a sacrifice she never chose.