AT A GLANCE
Why go?
On a quiet stretch of Petrovsko-Razumovskaya Alley near Moscow's Dynamo district, a two-metre bronze monument captures one of the most poignant moments in space history: a small white dog standing triumphantly atop an upturned human palm shaped like a rocket. Erected in 2008 on the grounds of the Military Medical Institute where the original experiment was prepared, the monument honours Laika — the first living creature to orbit Earth — and, by extension, all the dogs who gave their lives to make human spaceflight possible.↗↗↗
The Dog That Opened the Space Age
Laika — a little white street dog found on Moscow's streets in 1954 — was selected by Soviet scientists for a mission that would change the world forever. On 3 November 1957, just four weeks after Sputnik 1 orbited Earth as a bare metal sphere, Sputnik 2 carried Laika aloft in a sealed conical capsule four metres tall. Inside, she had a feeding apparatus, a thermal regulation system, air regeneration equipment, and sensors recording her pulse, breathing, blood pressure, and heart bio-potentials. Television cameras monitored her behaviour as the spacecraft climbed above the atmosphere.↗
