Soviet officials hid the details of Laika’s sad fate for decades. The news from Moscow was all good.

It had been four days since the Soviet Union launched the first dog into orbit — and global adoration. The Cold War had split the world in two, but people everywhere were searching the sky for a glimpse of the streaking white blip that was Sputnik 2, carrying sweet little Laika high above the planet.

Now, the Associated Press reported, word was circulating in the Russian capital that the 3-year-old, 13-pound former stray, believed to be a spitz-terrier mix, would soon be coming home.

“Return of the dog would complete a triumph in the saga of the second satellite: A roundtrip into space,” the AP enthused. “The parachute drop would be the longest ever, of course.”But by then, the big-eyed, pointy-eared pup was already dead. She had succumbed to overheating and panic within hours of the Nov. 3, 1957, launch. There had never been any plan to bring her back alive.

For the Soviets, the launch the month before of Sputnik 1 had been not only a scientific triumph but a propaganda coup. Moscow’s mastery of the technology required to send the first man-made satellite into orbit, and the military superiority it implied, had provoked a crisis of confidence in the West, and Nikita Khrushchev was delighted.

Eager to expand his country’s lead in the Space Race — and to deepen its adversaries’ alarm — the Soviet premier gave his space program just weeks to ready the next mission: launching an animal into orbit.

That was enough time to gather dogs from a Moscow shelter, pick one for her obedience and demeanor, surgically implant a device to monitor her vital signs, and try to get her accustomed to the half-square-meter space into which she would be sealed. It wasn’t enough time to develop a reentry system to deliver her back to Earth.

That the mission would be a one-way trip wasn’t part of the announcement. Still, animal welfare groups — there wasn’t yet the organized animal rights movement of today — condemned it as cruel. Dog owners and their animals demonstrated outside Soviet embassies in Washington and London and U.N. headquarters in New York.

Laika, Russian for “barker,” blasted off 69 years ago Tuesday from Scientific Research Test Range No. 5 in Kazakhstan atop an R-7 rocket. She was given enough nutrition and oxygen to survive seven to 10 days.

For the next week, Soviet officials claimed in daily communiqués that the dog was alive and well. Then, they said, she was euthanized humanely, before her capsule ran out of oxygen. It wasn’t until after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 that the truth emerged.

During liftoff, monitor data sent back to Flight Control Center in Moscow showed, Laika’s heart rate tripled and her breath rate quadrupled. At maximum acceleration, she experienced 5 Gs.

When the rocket entered orbit, the satellite failed to separate from the last rocket stage. The thermal control system malfunctioned. Heat insulation tore away. Inside the capsule, the temperature rose above 100 degrees.

Laika is believed to have died between five and seven hours into the flight, on the satellite’s fourth circuit of Earth. The craft circled for another 161 days, completing some 2,570 laps before falling from orbit and burning up in reentry.

For the Soviets, Sputnik 1 had been an unalloyed victory. But the achievement of Sputnik 2, six times heavier, with telemetry equipment, scientific equipment and life support systems for a live mammal, was tempered by the outcry against the premeditated killing of the street dog who had captured hearts around the world.

The intrepid mutt has been a presence in popular culture ever since, the inspiration for dozens of songs, books and films. Historians of animal rights now see her death as a seminal moment in the movement, and rights advocates continue to invoke her memory in arguments against animal testing.

“Laika’s heartbreaking story is part of a larger pattern of cruelty where humans treat other animals as disposable tools instead of individuals,” Sara Oliver wrote for PETA in 2025. “Humanity failed her — and millions of other animals — but we are learning from our mistakes.”The Soviets continued to launch dogs into space, the data from which they viewed as critical preparation for manned missions. (NASA used monkeys and chimpanzees.) But never again would they make a dog the unwitting victim of a suicide mission. All subsequent flights included plans for the animals’ safe recovery.

In the 1990s, as the details of Laika’s ordeal began to emerge, veterans of the Soviet space program expressed long-withheld misgivings.

“Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us,” former Soviet Air Force Lt. Gen. Oleg Gazenko, the scientist who trained Laika, is reported to have said in 1998. “The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.”Photo Almanac is an occasional series from The Washington Post, using photo archives to examine where we’ve been to understand where we are.