Last month was the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Sputnik I, which propelled humanity into the Space Age.<\/p>\n
Today, November 3rd, is the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Sputnik II, the first space craft to carry a living creature — the dog, Laika<\/a>.<\/p>\n Laika died a few hours into her flight due to overheating inside the capsule. Her body was immolated when Sputnik II reentered Earth’s atmosphere approximately six months later.<\/p>\n In Lawrence Miles’ novel Alien Bodies<\/i> the third Doctor recovers Laika’s body using the TARDIS and gives her a proper burial.<\/p>\n A moment for Laika, the world’s first space explorer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last month was the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Sputnik I, which propelled humanity into the Space Age. Today, November 3rd, is the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Sputnik II, the first space craft to carry a living creature — the dog, Laika. Laika died a few hours into her flight due toContinue reading “On the First Space Traveller”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[128],"tags":[4110,469,425],"class_list":["post-1482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","tag-history","tag-russia","tag-space-exploration","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}