Just a month ago we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the first man's landing on the Moon, which took place on July 20, 1969 by the US mission Apollo 11. Almost nine years earlier, however, on August 19, 1960, that is exactly 59 years ago, two of our four-legged friends went into space for the first time (although without reaching the Moon, mind you): the two dogs Belka and Strelka were sent into orbit by the Soviet mission Sputnik 5, together with a real own zoo.
In addition to the two quadrupeds, in fact, a gray rabbit, 42 mice, 2 rats, flies and a large number of plants and mushrooms also boarded that missile. All the animals survived the feat, the first in history of its kind: the shuttle Sputnik 5 in fact returned to Earth the next day, on August 20, 1960, and Belka e Strelka, which means Squirrel and Little Arrow in Russian, landed safely after a full day out of the Earth's atmosphere, their natural habitat. To be precise, the space shuttle that housed a small "Noah's ark" orbited the planet 18 times.
Strelka later had six puppies with a dog named Pushok and they participated in several ground-based space experiments; however, he never returned to space. One of her puppies was called Pushinka ("Feather") and was given to the daughter of President John F. Kennedy by Nikita Khrushchev in 1961. The two dogs, after their death, were embalmed and kept in the Museum of Cosmonauts in Moscow .
