 On November 3rd of 1957, the Soviet Union launched history's first ever living being into orbit around the Earth. She was a dog named Leica, and she was launched primarily so the Soviets could score another psychological victory over the United States. In early 1957, a team of engineers led by Sergei Korolev were working on developing the R-7 missile. The R-7 was an ICBM designed to give the Soviet Union the ability to launch warheads at the United States, but Korolev had another use in mind for his R-7. He really wanted to use it to launch a satellite and eventually human into space. Like so many of his contemporaries developing rockets and missiles, he dreamed of using them for peaceful purposes of space exploration, not just for war. Korolev's program to develop a satellite was approved by the Soviet Premier Khrushchev, but only because Korolev promised the leader that it wouldn't derail the R-7 program. With clearance, he started developing a satellite that was going to be quite complex, packed with scientific instruments to gather a lot of data. But time pressures eventually led him to pick something much simpler, the satellite we know as Sputnik. I tell the full backstory in this video right up here. Though he'd approved the satellite program, Khrushchev didn't really care about Sputnik. He thought it was just a side project. Really what he wanted was the missiles that could deliver the warheads. But when he heard how the Americans were reacting to the small satellite, he changed his tune. Sputnik was a harmless satellite that did nothing more than beep, but still Americans were terrified that now the Soviets had the capability to bomb them from space, or at least had these larger missiles available to launch warheads across the oceans. It was the fear that really excited Khrushchev. Suddenly he was very proud of Korolev, so proud in fact, that he wanted to have a second satellite up almost immediately to mark the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Now, this was a tall order. The anniversary was on November 7th of 1957, so a little over a month after Sputnik. And Khrushchev wasn't exactly a man accustomed to not getting what he wanted. He called Korolev to the Kremlin days after Sputnik's launch and told him that he wanted something to mark the anniversary of the revolution. He had to get it done that there were no ifs ands or buts about it. So Korolev's team, who by now had gone on vacation to celebrate and recover before getting back to work, were all called back after just five days and set to work developing something that could blow Sputnik out of the water. And they really did. Sputnik 2 was more than six times heavier than the first satellite, and it was far more complex. Where Sputnik could only beep, Sputnik 2 could keep a biological payload alive in space, but not just some kind of bacteria. This one was designed to carry a dog. A dog was actually a fairly natural choice for the Soviet Union. Soviet scientists had used dogs in earlier suborbital flights to gather data, so they'd been working with these animals already. And dogs were pretty easy to find. There were strays everywhere that could be used in spaceflight. Leica was one of these strays. She had short hair, a long neck, and was found milling around a bar one night. She was about three years old, and because she was a stray, was pretty independent and didn't need to be coddled by humans. She was trained just like any other astronaut would be. She did centrifuge runs, was exposed to the sounds of a launch and the vibrations of a launch, and fed a diet of gelified dog space food. Try as they might, Leica's handlers and trainers could not get attached to the cute little dog. And when they went to go give her one last cuddle before locking her in her spacecraft, it was a tearful moment for many involved. They knew she wasn't going to come back. Sputnik 2, in spite of reports to the West, did not have any re-entry system nor a landing system. Leica launched on November 3rd, but didn't last the eight to ten days scientists had been hoping for. Instead, she perished within hours. The environmental control system in her spacecraft malfunctioned, and she succumbed to excessive heat and dehydration just hours after launching. But before Leica perished, biometric data was received at tracking stations around the world, one of which was owned by the U.S. Air Force. Four years later, a young Air Force flight surgeon named Dwayne Graveline got his hands on Leica's data, and was so fascinated he ended up becoming an expert in Soviet bio-astronautics for the United States. His story is fascinating. I met Graveline in 2012, and 50 years after this event, he told me that Leica still had a special place in his heart because he credited Leica with giving the United States Soviet secrets that ultimately helped NASA put a man on the moon. The full story is over in my companion blog post at Discover Magazine. I urge you guys to check it out. It is incredible, and will give you a different appreciation for just what Leica's mission meant to scientists around the world. If you have more questions about Leica, or recollections of seeing the launch or reading about it when you were a kid, let me know in the comments below. You guys know I love to hear your stories, and of course anything you would like to see covered in future episodes. As always, be sure to follow me on Twitter and Instagram for daily vintage-based content, and with new videos going up right here every single week, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode.