Before cosmonauts and astronauts, a team of Soviet space dogs blasted into the inky unknown. And the descendants of those that survived ended up living in the last place you might expect

The engineers who sealed Laika into a narrow, windowless Sputnik 2 space capsule on 3 November 1957 knew it was the last time they would ever see her. Following the success of Sputnik 1 on 4 October, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had ordered a dog be flown within a month. But in the scramble to get the spacecraft ready in time, no-one had figured out how to get the animal back alive.

“This was always going to be a one-way mission,” says Doug Millard, space curator at London’s Science Museum. “It was at the height of the Cold War and this was serious stuff, part of a struggle between the superpowers.”

Once successfully in orbit, the world was told how Laika would survive a week in comfort, with plenty of food and water, before passing away painlessly. It emerged in 2002 that the dog had only lasted seven hours before dying of panic and heat exhaustion.