http://librarian.i2p/get/660117695619760824/15709282579916263388
So before sending a human being into orbit, we sent Laika, a little white dog from the streets of Moscow, who would test these unknowns for us. “Quite simply,” writes Olesya Turkina in her book Soviet Space Dogs , “without the first dog in space there would be no human spaceflight.” Laika rode into orbit on November 3, 1957. The USSR reported that she survived for about a week, returned a stream of valuable data that would help make human spaceflight possible, and then...