By Fiona Macdonald
In November 1957, Soviet scientists sent Laika on a one-way voyage, making her a tragic national hero. Nearly sixty years on, one scientist's son told the BBC about playing with her as a boy.
A lesser-known aspect of the Cold War space race involved Soviet scientists scouring the streets of Moscow for stray mongrels. Before the earliest human spaceflights, female canines were trained to undertake the highly dangerous journey – and on 3 November 1957, a dog called Laika was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, becoming the first ever living creature to orbit the Earth.
Sadly, though, Laika did not survive her voyage. The tragic part of her story is that the Soviets knew all along that hers would be a one-way trip. "Scientists then did not know how to return living creatures from orbit back to Earth," Prof Viktor Yazdovsky told the BBC's Witness History in 2017. "Everyone was very concerned for Laika. They knew that she would not return from her journey."
Yazdovsky's father Vladimir had been in charge of the medical side of the Soviet space programme, and Viktor recalled playing with Laika as a nine-year-old child shortly before her launch. "She was a very patient dog, very affectionate. She was easy to train. She was considered very clever. She had very expressive dark eyes…
My father brought her to my granny's house, not far from Moscow, and my sisters and I played with her. Dad thought that she needed this experience of being at home before the flight."
Read full article here.
First published at BBC, November 1, 2026
No comments:
Post a Comment