On November 3, 1957, the Soviet Union put a dog named Laika into orbit aboard Sputnik 2, the first living being to circle the Earth and a clear sign that the space race had moved from metal to life.
The craft followed Sputnik 1 by a month. Soviet engineers built it in a rush to mark the anniversary of the revolution, and Laika was chosen from stray dogs trained for the strain of flight.
The launch was loud. The dog was calm. She had no way home.
The flight showed that a living passenger could stand the g forces of launch and the strange weightlessness of orbit, data that fed directly into the plans for a human in space less than four years later, but Laika had no chance of returning and the mission ended her life, a fact that stirred protest among people who asked what the dog had agreed to.
Laika became a symbol on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Her name went on stamps and statues, and the test she did not survive opened the road that Yuri Gagarin would walk, alive and returning, in 1961.
The flight's fame grew because Laika could not choose her part, and the protest it drew pushed later missions to plan returns for their animal passengers. The dog's name outlived the politics that sent her up.