When the Soviet Union sent the dog Laika into orbit in 1957, the public was told she had survived for days — but decades later it emerged that she had actually died within hours, after Sputnik 2’s cabin overheated.

In October 2002, at the World Space Congress in Houston, the Russian scientist Dimitri Malashenkov presented a paper that corrected the public account of one of the most widely recounted events of the early space age. Laika, the dog carried into orbit aboard Sputnik 2 in November 1957, had not lived for several days in [...] The post When the Soviet Union sent the dog Laika into orbit in 1957, the public was told she had survived for days — but decades later it emerged that she had actually died