Laika

 glowed white with tinges of blues and greens through to the

tail’s yellowish fire that degraded to oranges and reds out

to the end. - strălucea alb cu nuanțe de albastru și verde până la focul gălbui al

cozii care s-a degradat în portocaliu și roșu până la capăt.

 Observers on one of the ships at sea, the Regent Springbok,

reported that the satellite looked like the tail of a

peacock, “each particle glowing through the spectrum from

white to a deep blue in magnificent display.” - Observatorii de

pe una dintre navele aflate pe mare, Regent Springbok, au raportat că satelitul arăta ca

coada unui păun, „fiecare particulă strălucind prin spectrul de la alb la un albastru

profund, într-o afișare magnifică”.

 . The dry calcium phosphates of Laika’s bones, the salts and minerals and the carbons of

her body—the very building blocks of life—dissipated in the upper atmosphere to drift

on stratospheric winds

 Oleg Gazenko, a physician who helped select and train Laika, notes in an interview for

the BBC documentary Space Dogs that “it was absolutely essential to have an answer to

the question, was weightlessness really an insurmountable barrier to the chances of a

human surviving any length of time in the conditions of space travel?” And even if a
 human being could manage increased radiation and decreased gravity, could he survive

the flight into space, the g-force of an accelerating rocket, and the violent vibration of

that wild ride? No one knew. So before sending a human being into orbit, we sent Laika,

a little white dog from the streets of Moscow, who would test these unknowns for us.

“Quite simply,” writes Olesya Turkina in her book Soviet Space Dogs, “without the first

dog in space there would be no human spaceflight.”

 Laika rode into orbit on November 3, 1957. The USSR reported that she survived for

about a week, returned a stream of valuable data that would help make human spaceflight

possible, and then died a painless death as her oxygen ran out.

 When Laika came to the kennels in Korolev’s space dog program, the team of engineers

and scientists first knew her as Kudryavka, Russian for Curly, or Little Curly. A few

sources report a nickname, Zhuchka, or Little Bug. After she went into space, a few

Soviet sources referred to her as Limonchik, or Little Lemon, but that name fell away

rather quickly. Then, capitalizing on the name of the satellite itself, the American press

came to call her Mutnik, a mongrel satellite. But the name by which she is best known,

her true and proper name, is Laika, the first living being to orbit the Earth, and the first to

die out there too. Laika is a noun derived from the Russian verb layat, which means to

bark. So in Russian, Laika means Barker, or Little Barker. The word laika also refers to a

breed of dog, a medium-sized hunting dog of northern Siberia, of which there are several

types. Laika herself may have come from laika stock, but it would be incorrect to call her

a laika. She was a mixed breed, a mongrel, a throwaway of unknown origin, living off the

scraps and refuse of Muscovites.

 That Laika barked, or was a barker, is not in question, but what did her barking mean to

the Soviet team that trained and worked with her? Is her name an expression of their
 annoyance or impatience with her and her barking? Or is it a celebration of her

personality, her character, an identifier as a vocal dog, a dog that speaks, a dog that

communicates because she is in tune with her surroundings and the dogs and people who

interact with her? Perhaps the team came to regard Laika’s barking as a quality that

distinguished her from the other space dogs in the kennels, a characteristic that made her

stand out.

 At the time of her flight, Laika weighed thirteen pounds and was about two years old, the

ideal size and age for a space dog. Her fur was mostly white, with a darker brown

covering her face, and a circle of white running around her black nose and leading up

between her eyes to the crown of her head. Her ears stood straight up, like a lot of laika

breed dogs, but then bent over at the tips, giving her a friendly look. In video footage of

Laika, her bent ears bounce about as she sits or stands, panting, giving her an air of

nervous ease. In her eyes, though, is an attendant intelligence, a quiet confidence, the

look of a dog that is deeply attuned to the people around her, to what they are doing, and

what that means to what she is doing

 As a stray living on the streets of Moscow, she was acquired by physician Vladimir

Yazdovsky’s team, the man Korolev had put in charge of directing biomedical operations

in the emerging space program, which included training and caring for the space dogs.

 In Abadzis’s book, Laika is born into a litter of seven puppies in the house of a

government official. The housemaid is ordered to get rid of the pups. One of the female

pups becomes her darling, and the housemaid works hard to find her a proper home. A

family adopts the pup for their young son. The boy resents the little dog for the way she

demands his attention and time, and one night he tosses her into the Moscow River. She

swims to the bank, a castoff, and takes to the streets. She befriends another stray dog.
 When a team of city dogcatchers captures her, they kill her companion in the process. A

sympathetic dogcatcher peers in at the pup through the door of her cage and remarks that

she “looks like [she’s] been through the wars.” The animal shelter is full, and the pup will

have to be euthanized, but then the dogcatcher remembers Yazdovsky, “the air force

chap,” who is looking for small stray dogs for some secret government program. That

secret government program is, of course, the space program, the program developing

missiles and rockets, and training dogs to ride those rockets into space. And so the pup

becomes a space dog. The pup becomes Laika.

 Despite the possibility of such a guardian angel attending to Laika on the streets, life

inside Korolev’s kennels would have been a marked improvement. Of course, she had to

endure space dog training, and eventually the job she was trained to do, but in exchange,

she lived in a warm, dry enclosure with wooden floors, with clean bedding of wood

shavings or straw. She had the company and social interaction of other space dogs in

training, most with similar backgrounds and stories. Her handlers took her out for a walk

at least twice a day. And she was watered and fed regularly, a diet that included meat,

bone broth, vegetables, fish oil, and milk. Space dogs that were about to fly in a rocket

were offered an even better meal that sometimes included a good Russian sausage. This

practice was carried forward to cosmonauts and astronauts, who gather even today for a

preflight meal and may request anything they desire from the kitchen

 When an object achieves orbit, it becomes a satellite, for the word “satellite” defines any

body in orbit around another. In the Middle Ages “satellite” was used for a person who

follows another person superior in rank or status

 While it bears the distinction of being the first satellite powered by solar energy, it

weighed a mere 3.2 pounds. Khrushchev taunted the US, calling Vanguard I a grapefruit.
 Even so, while the first two sputniks came down within a couple of months, Vanguard I

is still up there, and it will likely remain in orbit for another couple hundred years

 Laika-brand cigarettes were hugely popular in the Soviet Union and in other countries.

Her image was featured on cigarette cases, cigar bands, matchboxes, postcards, posters,

in newspaper and magazine drawings and cartoons, on boxes of chocolates and chocolate

wrapping papers, lapel pins and badges, handkerchiefs, confectionery tins, playing cards,

commemorative plates, desktop sculptures, and porcelain figurines. In Japan, Laika’s

image was featured on a child’s tin watering can, a spinning top, and a bucket. In the US

she was featured on a child’s piggy bank, or “Sputnik Bank,” and on a child’s toy plastic

helmet with two metal spring antennas, the “Wee Beep Sputnik” helmet. In West

Germany a child’s mechanical toy featured Laika in a sputnik orbiting the Earth. And in

Mexico, a tin serving tray pictured Betty Boop walking Laika on a leash across the

surface of an alien world, possibly the moon. Laika has been the subject of poems,

children’s books, at least one graphic novel, a few books of nonfiction, songs, and music

videos. Years later, circulating on the internet, is the curious theory that Scooby-Doo is

an escaped Soviet space dog, perhaps in Laika’s image, and you can see such a space dog

running across the screen in the 2014 Marvel Studios movie Guardians of the Galaxy as

part of the cosmic collection of a character called The Collector.

 Laika is the only nonhuman represented on the Monument to the Conquerors of Space at

the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow. Positioned on the roof of the

museum, the monument is a 350-foot-high titanium sculpture of a rocket leading a plume

of exhaust and smoke from its engines. The monument is wrapped in a bas-relief of the

heroes of the Soviet space program.

not long before her scheduled launch. In his memoirs he writes that he “wanted to do

something nice for the dog since she didn’t have much longer to live.” And in 1998 Oleg

Gazenko, who worked under Yazdovsky, expressed his sadness and regret for sending

Laika to her death: “Work with animals is a source of suffering to us all…. The more

time passes, the more I am sorry about [Laika’s death]. We did not learn enough from the

mission to justify the death of the dog.

 When the Soviet team went to select a space dog to launch in Sputnik II, Laika earned

high marks. In her training she managed the extreme conditions of the centrifuge and the

vibration table, and she kept a calm and even disposition during prolonged periods of

isolation in the training capsule (up to twenty days). She did not become aggressive or

fight with her kennel mates, as so many smaller dogs are prone to do. The women and

men who worked with her describe her as sweet-natured, patient, and determined, a dog

that wanted to please, a dog talented in adapting to the place and the people with whom

she found herself. She was a survivor, a quality that saw her through that hard life on the

streets and, then, the rigorous training in the space dog program. Indeed, Korolev and

Yazdovsky both knew that street dogs made the best space dogs, because they were

tough, scrappy, and they could endure extremes of temperature, hunger, and isolation.

 And yet Laika was not the most qualified dog for Sputnik II. The team felt strongly that

a dog called Albina was the best choice. Albina was a favorite among the scientists and

engineers, “a celebrity who had twice been in research rockets at the height of hundreds

of kilometers,” writes engineer Oleg Ivanovsky (under the pen name Aleksei Ivanov) in

The First Steps: An Engineer’s Notes. Albina had flown both times with a dog called

Kozyavka, or Little Gnat, in June 1956. Having already proven herself in flight, she was
 the perfect choice for Sputnik II, but had she not risked enough? Didn’t she deserve

something for the contribution she had already made? Retirement, perhaps, a soft bed in a

warm house? Albina had something else going for her too: she had just given birth to a

litter of puppies, three little pups, one of which looked a lot like Laika. Yazdovsky

thought it too cruel to take the mother from her pups and subject her again to the risks of

rocket flight

 So unlike previous and later rocket trials using dogs, the dog chosen to fly on Sputnik II

was not just taking a risk, it was never coming back. The dog chosen for Sputnik II was

going to die in space or perhaps on the ride into space. Whatever, it was going to die.

 So which dog to choose: Laika or Albina?

 For the team, it was a tough choice, but a choice had to be made. Ivanovsky records this

moment in The First Steps: “The great majority inclined to send Laika into space.

Everyone knew that the animal would die, and there was no way to bring her back to

Earth, because we did not know how to do that. So it was particularly painful to send

Albina, everyone’s darling, to her death. Thus, Laika became the first.” By the first,

Ivanovsky means “the primary,” as all the space dogs scheduled to fly were assigned a

second, or a backup, in case something happened to prevent the primary from flying.

Albina, then, was named Laika’s second. Ivanovsky’s words also mean that Laika would

be first into orbit, first for the glory of the Soviet Union, and first for all time. And she

would also be the first, and the only, dog in the Soviet space dog program to be sent to

her death