I, on the other hand, recently became FURIOUS about Laika. About 15 years ago, I went to Minsk World. At the time, it was a theme park in Shenzhen; now it is a theme park in Tianjin. It is centred around the Minsk, an aircraft carrier that used to be the flagship of the Soviet Navy. It is really, really good. You can wander round the ship. There are performances by Russian marching bands, and you can ride a tank through an assault course on the wharf. It is the best thing ever. On the ship, one of the exhibits was a forlorn-looking stuffed dog. The sign next to it said it was Laika. I then went around for 15 years thinking I had seen Laika. Two weeks ago, it was my daughters' school play. It was all about space exploration. It was during the school play that I found out that Laika's body was never recovered. The stuffed dog in Shenzhen was fake. I am appalled.
I guess you missed the part about her flight predating the first attempts to bring back a payload from orbit. As a youngster, I had understood that she was euthanized in orbit to avoid suffering. Later, that was revealed to be untrue.
"Laika's body was never recovered." Most certainly not. First, she got got cooked in orbit because 'big hurry' meant no time to engineer adequate thermal controls. Second, there was never a plan for 'biological' re-entry. Laika's human friends knew they were saying good bye. Good dog.
That "euthanized" lie (sorry) was pretty icky. Based on shutting off oxygen. Please do not think about death of a chained critter without oxygen. Laika was not alone in one-way tripping though. Good dogs. Good monkeys. Good mice.
In context of those biologicals, it is well to consider Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard. Both their governments asserted that 'issues' had been resolved. Only a coupla heroes were needed to do that thing. Good Guys. Crazy guys! How to begin this thing in any other way?
