Laika Quotes

“Her ghost is still orbiting Earth inside the tiny dim lit room. Orbiting endlessly like an invisible moon circling our beautiful blue planet.”
― Gayendra, Broken Maps to Miniature Flights

“In the tumbling roll of the satellite, the little window turning over and over on the world, Laika was looking at everything there is, everything there ever was, her eyes taking in starlight that traveled across oceans of time to reach her, light from distant galaxies, from across a billion years, and she was looking down on the living Earth from orbit, even if in a chaotic whirl of the satellite's motion, and she was the first to take in this view. She saw the Earth, the blue marble, fragile, vulnerable, a kind of spaceship itself floating in the black void, impossibly alone.”
― Kurt Caswell, Laika's Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog

“I have to wonder, when Laika was a street dog in Moscow, did someone feed her, help her, give her a warm place to sleep on a cold winter night? Did a kind restaurateur give her food scraps when she appeared at the alley door? Was that someone a man, a woman, or several men or women? Was Laika befriended by a child? Did these people I am imagining mark that day when Laika, who was always there, was suddenly gone? And living through those next decades, and to the end of their lives, did they know (how could they know?) that the stray dog from the streets they had become so fond of was the same dog they read about in the newspapers and heard about on the radio, the now world-famous dog orbiting the Earth?”
― Kurt Caswell

“In that moment they must have acknowledged, even if only privately, that Laika was both simultaneously alive and dead—a kind of Schrödinger's cat—that the capsule was a container inside which she was alive, but from which she would never escape. In that moment the window became a medium through which they might witness the drama of her end, if only they could follow her that far, and a medium through which they might imagine their own ends and the fate of our own capsule, the Earth, which will not last forever. Where Laika was going—into the stars, into death—the scientists and engineers knew they were going too. Like her, they would go alone, as we all must go one day.”
― Kurt Caswell, Laika's Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog