Laika's Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog

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April 14, 1958, must have been a particularly clear night, one of those nights you remember for the great wash of the cosmos overhead, and for the black blackness of interstellar space punctuated by stars uncountable. It must have been so, for along the eastern seaboard of the United States, and out over the Caribbean, out to the east of the islands of Saint Thomas, Antigua, Martinique, Saint Lucia, Barbados, Trinidad, on to British Guiana (now Guyana), and over a host of ships in the Atlantic positioned between 10 and 20 degrees north latitude, people gazing skyward saw a path of burning light. Some reported that they had seen a comet. Others said it was a meteor, the fiery path of a meteoroid burning in the Earth’s atmosphere, what we like to call a shooting star. And still others reported they had seen a UFO.

But what those people witnessed was not a comet or a shooting star, and it was not a UFO. It was a phenomenon that had occurred only one other time in Earth’s history: the reentry into Earth’s atmosphere of an artificial satellite, in this case the Soviet Union’s second satellite, Sputnik II. On board was a small, white mongrel dog from the streets of Moscow. Her name was Laika. One of dozens of trained space dogs in the USSR’s new space program, she was the first living being to orbit the Earth. And as the satellite Sputnik II came down, Laika was already dead. Her body, in a state of decay from the cooling and warming inside her capsule as it passed in and out of the influence of the sun, had been in orbit around the Earth for the previous five months, traveling at a speed of 17,500 miles per hour and making 2,570 revolutions.

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