The tragedy of Laika, the first animal to orbit the earth

A model of Laika inside a replica of Sputnik 2 at the Central House of Aviation and Cosmonautics in Moscow. | Mladen Antonov/AFP via Getty Images In March, I visited the Lowell Observatory — the astronomical research site where Pluto was first discovered — in Flagstaff, Arizona. I stood in line to squint through telescopes at Jupiter and the surface of the moon before the night turned cloudy and drove me inside the Astronomy Discovery Center museum. And like all museum visits, it ended in the gift shop. This one was full of space paraphernalia, astronaut dolls, and NASA shirts. But wh