'An icon of Soviet space exploration': The Russian stray dog that beat humans into orbit

In November 1957, Soviet scientists sent Laika on a one-way voyage, making her a tragic national hero. Sixty years on, one scientist's son told the BBC about playing with her as a boy.

A lesser-known aspect of the Cold War space race involved Soviet scientists scouring the streets of Moscow for stray mongrels. Before the earliest human spaceflights, female canines were trained to undertake the highly dangerous journey – and on 3 November 1957, a dog called Laika was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, becoming the first ever living creature to orbit the Earth.

Sadly, though, Laika did not survive her voyage. The tragic part of her story is that the Soviets knew all along that hers would be a one-way trip. "Scientists then did not know how to return living creatures from orbit back to Earth," Prof Viktor Yazdovsky told the BBC's Witness History in 2017. "Everyone was very concerned for Laika. They knew that she would not return from her journey."

Yazdovsky's father Vladimir had been in charge of the medical side of the Soviet space programme, and Viktor recalled playing with Laika as a nine-year-old child shortly before her launch. "She was a very patient dog, very affectionate. She was easy to train. She was considered very clever. She had very expressive dark eyes… My father brought her to my granny's house, not far from Moscow, and my sisters and I played with her. Dad thought that she needed this experience of being at home before the flight."

After the successful Sputnik I launch on 4 October 1957, which sent the world's first man-made satellite into orbit, Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev had ordered the new mission. "He said: 'We didn't believe you could launch a satellite before the Americans – but you did it,'" engineer Georgi Grechko, who worked on the launch team for Sputnik I and II, told the BBC in 2019. "'Now,' [Khruschev] said, and this was mid-October, 'For the anniversary of the revolution on 7 November, I want you to launch something new.'"

According to Yazdovsky, "That's why not everything could be thought through in this flight preparation." To coincide with the 40th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Khruschev had given his scientists – headed up by chief designer Sergei Korolev – just a few weeks to follow up Sputnik I.

Handily, the task dovetailed with Korolev's personal aims. Known as the founding father of the Soviet space programme, after World War Two he had reverse-engineered the Nazis' V2 rockets to create a Soviet version capable of launching their own atomic bombs, which were much heavier than the US devices. His R7 Semyorka rocket had achieved a successful launch in August 1957, becoming the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile. But Korolev had long harboured ambitions for something else entirely.

Ever since he'd started building rockets in the 1930s, he'd hoped they would go into space, as his daughter told the BBC in 2019. "From childhood my father wanted to conquer the skies. He dreamt of becoming a pilot. He built gliders and an airplane. Then after that he began to design rockets," said Prof Natalya Koroleva. "It was a burning passion throughout his life to design rockets and fly them. He wrote: 'From now on I have one aim in life – to........

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