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Most people think Laika was the first dog in a rocket, but she wasn't. Laika was the first dog to orbit the planet before dying a horrible death a few hours later from either running out of oxygen or getting cooked alive in Sputnik 2 which was the second spacecraft to orbit around Earth.
She pioneered the path to manned spaceflight by proving that a living being could survive being launched into orbit and endure microgravity. She also provided crucial data on how living organisms react to spaceflight environments.
Laika's actual name was Kudryavka which means Little Curly in Russian. Western media eventually settled on the name of Laika out of the many names used in headlines about the dog. Laika - A collective name for various husky like breeds that the international press used as her name. She was a stray dog like other dogs in the space program selected for their scrappiness and ability to survice extreme conditions.
Her training conditions and death have been a source of controversy with animal rights groups and individuals for decades, Laika's last meal was some terrible nutritional space goo she ate in the capsule during her flight.
Legacy and Recognition
The plan was always to give Laika a one way ticket to space and there wasn't much attention paid to the fact that she was intended to die in space until sometime later. This first started with outside the Soviet Union, but eventually even scientists in the space program expressed regret and guilt about sending animals to their death without any real scientific gains.
Eventually it was decided that future missions sending dogs into space should have some sort of return plan. Of course this didn't mean that every dog that went into space after Laika survived. Four more dogs died in accidents or in intentional explosions to protect Soviet rocket science. Laika was recognized later with a cameo in a big monument depicting the history of the space program in 1997, but in 2008 she was recognized with her very own half-hand, half-rocket holding a dog monument for her bravery even though the poor dog really had no idea what she was getting herself into.
