The first living thing to go into space

60 years ago, the Laika street dog went down in history as the first living being to leave the Earth's atmosphere on a journey of no return. The USSR launched a safety test satellite with Laika for future human missions.
Even today, 60 years after its launch into space, the question arises as to why Laika was chosen to embark on that journey of no return.
First of all, the teams of scientists who worked on this project determined that when a dog is sent into space, it should not be purebred because it was more demanding and not very resourceful, and that it should be a female because they do not have to raise their legs when urinating. less space.Also dogs had to be photogenic.
To accommodate the pressure capsule, only 80 cm long, the dogs were constantly trained and moved day by day into smaller and smaller cages.
Of all the other candidates, Laika, a three-year-old wanderer from Moscow, passed the tests the best.
The Sputnik satellite was launched Moscow time at 5:30 in Kazakhstan. During the take-off, Laika's heart accelerated significantly, and only after three hours did it return to normal. Suddenly, during the ninth orbit around the Earth, the temperature in the capsule began to jump sharply and reach 40. Although there was hope that Laika would stay alive for at least 10 days, she died a few hours after launch due to heat stroke and dehydration. but they did not say the exact cause. The official version was that Laika passed away from the poison put in the food in order to avoid the torment of combustion in the atmosphere. The satellite with the remains burned in the atmosphere five months later, on April 14, 1958, over the Antilles in the Atlantic Ocean.
This Laika's launch into space led Russian scientists to further research, which four years later showed the result by sending the first man into space - Yuri Gagarin.