This next picture is a Soviet dog named Laika. She was the first dog to make it into orbit so probably deserves a statue in the Red Square or something, especially as she was also the first dog to die in orbit as well which makes her legend and sacrifice all the more powerful. Maybe the fact that her spacesuit was so weird and obviously designed to look like it came formt he future despite having none of the expected capabilities of such a suit had something to do with this. Who knows? Here’s a closer look at the spacesuit that Laika wore in space on that fateful trip:

Yeah, that just makes it look even weirder huh? No wonder he didn’t survive going up into space. Actually though it turns out it didn’t actually have anything to do with the spacesuit and actually happened because of overheating in the spaceship. Wikipedia tells me that this was caused by the  failure of the R7 sustainer to separate from the payload but I don’t know what that means so let’s jsut leave it at that. Wikipedia also told me that the Russians actually did build a small monument to Laika which features a dog on top of a rocket, only it isn’t in the Red Square but near a military research facility somewhere in Moscow. I guess it’s better than nothing.

This is probably the only dog in a spacesuit so far that has actually looked anything near cute, which is what I’m sure all of you were hoping for when you clicked onto this article. Apologies abut that, back in the day when people were sending dogs into space they were very serious about the whole process, and as such there was very little time for cute snaps of the dogs and only really time for making the dog’s spacesuits as freaky and weird looking as possible.

Here’s the dog spacesuit from the top image of this article where it currently resides now, at Leciester’s National Space Centre, so you know if you want to see it in the flesh then you know where you need to go. I don’t really know how Leicester managed to get their hands on a National Space Centre or the only surviving dog spacesuit in the world (allegedly) but I guess it needs to be famous for something other than Walker’s crisps and Gary Lineker (which are arguably the same thing anyway), I just find it hard to believe that Moscow would give it up so easily. But yeah they did and it’s in Leicester. To be honest that makes me almost want to travel all the way to Leicester to check it out considering it’s the only one on display in the whole fvcking world, but then I thought about it again and decided that having to go to Leicester definitely wasn’t worth it.

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