Laika

Photo: Jennifer Bastian
M. A. Peers’s portrait of Laika, a dog used on an early Soviet space flight. The painting is at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles.

NYTimes:
"Photographs of Laika usually show her in the laboratory, looking nervous and beleaguered in her spacesuit. Yet here she looks intelligent and alert, her ears cocked against a blue, skylike void. On the wall above her are the words “All the universe is full of the lives of perfect creatures,” from Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, the 19th-century Russian schoolteacher whose visionary drawings and writings foresaw the concept of space travel, with animals as the first pioneers."