Quote:
Originally Posted by driveway
I'm gonna go outside the box a little bit on this pick, if anyone disagrees, I'm prepared to defend the choice.
In the category of Explorer, team Know Your Role selects:
Laika, the first mammal to enter space.
Laika was a stray from the streets of Moscow. She was trained, along with two other dogs, for participation in a mission that was to repeat the stunning soviet success of Sputnik 1.
Laika died a few hours after launch, but her mission proved that living creatures could survive launch and entry into orbit and paved the way for manned missions into space.
Wherever else we end up going in the universe some small amount of credit deserves to go to this small stray dog, who was incapable of understanding her place in human history. Ithroughout human history |
Hey, I wrote an article about dogs of the Soviet Space Program for the latest issue of UPPERCASE Magazine!
http://www.uppercasegallery.ca/uppercasemagazine/
The thing about Laika's mission is that it was largely politically motivated, and was the only time the Soviet program sent up a dog without intending to bring her back down; Kruschev wanted a spectacular event to correspond with the 40th anniversary of the revolution, so they were forced to throw something together without the amount of planning and care they would normally give it. Many of the scientists later said that they regretted her mission and they didn't enough out of it scientifically to make it worth killing her.
So I'm not sure she really discovered that much, but I still think this is a pretty cool pick. Nicely done.