Laika is complete! Voting for ArtPrize starts tomorrow, September 18, 2025. The first vote you cast has to be within the grounds of ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, MI, but you can vote daily after that from anywhere, until the event ends on October 4. Please do attend and vote for Laika if you're able! There's prize money to be won and I gotta buy new hips for Mayhem No Bones Jones. Also it's genuinely a super cool event and you should go if you can!
https://www.artprize.org/entries#23233
THE PATRON SAINT OF ONE-WAY TRIPS
In 1957, Laika, a small stray dog taken from the streets of Moscow, was the first living creature to orbit the earth. Her trainers kissed her nose and begged her forgiveness, and then sealed her inside the capsule of Sputnik 2 three days before launch. She waited patiently in a compartment just large enough for her to stand as they readied the rockets. It was early November, and she was cold.
In the days before her historic journey, the scientist who had chosen Laika to fly took her home from the laboratory where she had been trained. He let her play with his children. He later wrote, "Laika was quiet and charming...I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live."
Sputnik 2 launched with Laika as its sole passenger on 3 November, 1957. It had a porthole, only six inches wide, where Laika could see the earth leaving her behind. The rockets roared beneath her, and Laika, Little Barker, was the first to look down and see the whole world spinning below her, blue and gold in the velvet blackness.
There was never any plan to retrieve Laika. We could send her up, but the technology did not exist to bring her safely down. But for days, the Soviets insisted that Laika was alive and well in Sputnik 2.
In reality, she hadn’t made it nearly that long. The heat and stress killed her mere hours after launch.
But she did succeed in her mission: Laika circled the world four times before she passed. It’s impossible to know what she thought or felt in the hours she orbited above us. Her story is a triumph of human ingenuity and a testament to human cruelty. We cannot consider Laika without marveling at the universe and wondering if it was right to subject her to the fate she suffered. Did Laika, viewing the world, think it was beautiful? Did she feel alone?
Eventually, months after she passed, her ship fell from orbit and broke apart on reentry, leaving a trails of fire in the sky that stretched from New York to the Amazon.
And at last, Laika came home in a rain of wishing stars.
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