Laika became the first living creature to orbit Earth

On November 3, 1957, less than a month after Sputnik 1 opened the Space Age, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2 carrying a small mongrel named Laika — the first living creature to orbit Earth. Plucked from the streets of Moscow and chosen for her calm temperament, she was strapped into a padded, pressurized cabin wired with sensors that beamed her heartbeat and breathing back to mission control.

There was a catch the program could not engineer away in time: the capsule had no way to return. Recovery technology simply did not exist yet, so Laika’s flight was always one-way.

Engineers had not solved temperature control, and Laika likely survived only a few hours after reaching orbit.

For decades Soviet accounts blurred her fate; only in 2002 did a mission scientist confirm she died from overheating early in the flight. Sputnik 2 itself circled until reentry on April 14, 1958. Laika never came home, but she proved a body could ride a rocket into orbit and keep functioning — clearing the path for human spaceflight.