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This would would become the first creature to fly into orbit. That "something" would be a dog, a female dog. Now please launch something new in space for the next anniversary of our revolution." After Sputnik 1, when Korolev met with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the premier wanted to press his advantage over the United States. "We never thought that you would launch a Sputnik before the Americans," Khrushchev told Korolev, according to cosmonaut Georgy Grechko. Thanks to Korolev, with that small, 60cm spherical satellite, the Soviet Union had just won the opening salvo of the Space Race.īut no. The Daily Mirror ran with the headline: “THE DOG WILL DIE, WE CAN’T SAVE IT”.After the Soviet rocket genius Sergei Korolev led that nation's space program masterfully in the 1950s, culminating with the launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, one might have expected that the country would have taken time to celebrate his achievements.

True to nature, Britain took the side of the dog and as the news broke, phone lines were jammed with animal rights activists trying to reach the Soviet Embassy in London. The world reacted to Laika with a mixture of astonishment, humour (endless variations of ‘muttnik’), and admonishment. Laika’s spacecraft, Sputnik 2, continued to orbit the Earth for another five months until it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere in April 1958. This fact was only revealed by Russia in 2002. Unfortunately the spacecraft’s heating never worked properly and Laika died due to heat exhaustion only about five hours (four orbits) into her flight. During launch her heartbeat soared to 240 beats per minute but she was calm enough to eat food once she was weightless, proving that eating in space was possible. On 31 October 1957, several days before launch, Laika was strapped into her satellite on top of a modifed R-7 rocket where she sat until the early morning of 3 November. During her final days before launch, one of the Soviet scientists took her home to play with his children, knowing she wouldn’t survive the flight. She was trained in a centrifuge to get her used to the g-forces of launch, trained to eat a high-nutrition gel as food, and trained in progressively smaller cages to replicate the spacecraft size. Laika was a stray dog from Moscow who was selected for both her hardiness and her docile behaviour. The timing was no coincidence – the Soviet Union was keen to mark the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution with something truly remarkable. The world had only just recovered from the shock of the Soviet’s launch of Sputnik 1, and less than a month later, on 3 November 1957, the Soviets shocked the world again with the launch of Laika on a vastly more complicated satellite, Sputnik 2. What’s astonishing about her flight is just how quickly it came after the first ever object in orbit – Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957. Laika was the first animal to orbit the Earth so she became the first true test of prolonged weightlessness. But these were all sub-orbital rocket flights, which meant the rocket went up into space and came straight back down without spending time in orbit around the Earth. Laika was preceded by a host of mice (first flight in 1950), monkeys (first flight in 1949), and even the humble fruit fly, which had the honour of becoming the first living organism in space in 1947. But despite common misconception, she was not the first animal in space, or even the first dog in space.

Laika is by far the most famous animal ever to have travelled into space. Sadly her symbolic mission was only ever intended as a one-way trip and she died only a few hours into her flight. Her historic flight was one of the defining moments of the Space Race, and Laika quickly became a household name. This week marks the 60th anniversary of the launch of Laika the dog, the first animal to orbit the Earth. Their flights into space proved – with increasingly complexity – that animals could breathe, eat, and perform basic tasks in space. Hence the early space pioneers – fruit flies, monkeys, mice, dogs, cats and even a tortoise – paved the way for the human astronauts that followed. There was no way to know for sure without actually sending living organisms into space. Would a human be able to survive the g-forces of launch and landing? Would the harmful radiation above our atmosphere make them sick? Would they even be able to swallow food as they became weightless? When America and Russia first set about the task of sending a human into space, there were a huge number of open questions.