Today in Space History - Laika's quiet orbit 🚀
Stardate -181.1510 (NOVEMBER 3, 1957)
Before dawn at Baikonur, an R-7 rose with a passenger who would not come home. Sputnik 2, assembled in the weeks after the first satellite, carried the small Moscow stray Laika into Earth orbit. She was the first animal to circle the planet. The cabin that held her was never built to return.
Telemetry showed she reached space alive. Heat from a failed thermal system ended her flight within hours, a truth told plainly only decades later. The satellite itself stayed aloft until April 1958. What remained was a harder lesson: a living body could endure the ride to orbit, and the cost of learning that was not abstract.