Soviet Space Dogs

This article always makes me sad. These dogs have an affinity for and trust their humans only to be sent off and get exploded, crashed onto the surface of the Earth, or starved of oxygen. I can't imagine what's going through their minds when they head out.

This Chemical Brothers video parallels some of Laika's story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRfSM-lv55I

There's also an excellent comic about Laika: https://www.amazon.com/Laika-Nick-Abadzis/dp/1596431016

There is a great exhibit of portraits of these dogs at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles ("The Lives of Perfect Creatures"):

http://mjt.org/recentaddtions/creatures.html

If you're interested in this, there's a really amazing book with this same title that has tons of info and a huge amount of great imagery as well.

http://fuel-design.com/publishing/soviet-space-dogs/

Highly recommended, though also as others have pointed out quite sad.

Those two pictures of Belka and Strelka are really of those two dogs, taxidermied and placed in the space museum in Moscow with their capsule between them. The crate or living quarters they rode in is also in the museum, in a different room.

Amazing museum by the way, housed in the base of a sculpture of a soaring rocket!

I named my dog 'Laika'.

Just last week, I was looking for Belka and Strelka t-shirts.

Will this be a primary source for hipster dog names in the next few years?

Great name for a band!

>Dogs were the preferred animal for the experiments because scientists felt dogs were well suited to endure long periods of inactivity.

Wow, 2 plus 2 really did equal 5 for Soviet apparatchiks!