Laika becomes the first animal to orbit Earth
A stray Moscow dog rides Sputnik 2 to orbit and dies within hours, a fact hidden for decades
Quick facts
- Agency
- USSR
- Launch date
- 3 November 1957
- Payload weight
- 508 kg
- Truth revealed
- 2002
What happened
Less than a month after Sputnik 1, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2 on 3 November 1957, carrying a dog named Laika, a stray picked up off the streets of Moscow. Sputnik 2 weighed about 508 kilograms, far more than its predecessor, and remained attached to its booster rocket after reaching orbit. Soviet engineers built the mission in under a month at Premier Nikita Khrushchev's request, timed to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Because the schedule left no time to design a recovery system, no provisions were made to bring Laika home alive; the mission was never meant to be survivable. Soviet media claimed for years that she survived for days in orbit. In October 2002, however, Russian scientist Dimitri Malashenkov revealed that Laika's capsule had overheated and she had died within a few hours of launch, not days as officially reported at the time.
Why it matters
Sputnik 2 proved a living creature could survive launch and reach orbit, data the Soviets needed before risking a cosmonaut, and it deepened American alarm that the USSR could now loft far heavier payloads than Sputnik 1's simple beeper. The decades-long cover-up of Laika's actual survival time also became an early, well-documented case of Cold War space propaganda outliving the mission itself.
How we know
NASA's history office account of the mission draws on declassified Soviet program details; Malashenkov's 2002 disclosure of the true cause and timing of Laika's death, presented at a world space congress, is treated by NASA's own retrospective as the credible correction to the original Soviet claims.
Sources
- NASA History Office. 60 Years Ago: The First Animal in Orbit · Primary source (author-declared)nasa.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Smithsonian Magazine. The Sad, Sad Story of Laika, the Space Dog, and Her One-Way Trip Into Orbit · Reputable sourcesmithsonianmag.com · The domain "smithsonianmag.com" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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