Space Race
American just a few weeks later , but it would take John Glenn ’ s February 1962 trip aboard Friendship 7 until an American made an orbit of the Earth . Saying these were the first men in space and the first men in orbit is not merely to adopt sexist language . Importantly , cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman in orbit , two years after Gagarin , circling the Earth forty-eight times over three days in 1963 . All of this is true . And it is true , too , that the Soviets placed the first thing in orbit : Sputnik 1 , less than two feet in diameter , reached an elliptical low Earth orbit on October 4 , 1957 . True , and true again . But Gagarin was not truly the first person in orbit . That distinction goes to a different Soviet . And her story ( and yes , it is a her story ), begins in 1954 when she was born , and ends in 1957 ... in space .
Back in 1957 , Nikita Khrushchev wanted something big for the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution . Specifically , by November 7 , 1957 he wanted to have Sputnik 2 in the air . And he wanted it to be carrying a live Soviet citizen .
Laika was found on the streets of Moscow in 1957 . She was around twelve pounds , a Husky-terrier mix , though clearly not anything close to a purebred . She had been living on her own for a while , perhaps most of her life . Because such a difficult life had conditioned her to survive in situations of extreme cold and stress , she was chosen to be part of the Soviet program , a candidate for space travel and the inhospitable environment that space might offer a lonely voyager . Vladimir Yazdovsky , chief of the space-dog initiative , wrote that from the very beginning “ Laika was quiet and charming .” 3 ( See figure 8 .)
3 https :// operavision . org / 2008 / 04 / 11 / 755 /( Accessed |
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