Judging from photographs and her treatment in Nick Abadzis's gloriously humane but comparatively unsentimental graphic novel, Laika (out this month from First Second), she was a good first representative, too, being bright, tough and cute as a button: a survivor. A small, stray mutt with bright eyes and perky ears who looked like a Samoyed-husky mix, Laika was the first living Earth creature sent into orbit. There was, however, one great difference with this second satellite: it had a passenger, Laika, a female dog. In November 1957, the Soviet Union announced that it had launched a second satellite into space, the prosaically named Sputnik II being mostly little more than an in-your-face follow-up to the previous month's launch of Sputnik, which had thrown the non-Communist world into a frenzy of fright and self-criticism.
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