Space Dogs

This BBC4 documentary features extraordinary footage of the Russian spaceflights involving dogs.

There are a number of interviews with the scientists who trained them, sent them into space, and mourned the ones that died -- almost half the complement of 48 told to sit whilst being hurtled through the sky.

Among several bizarre quotes, the scientist Aleksandr Seryapin said he was told, 'We're asking you to do something outside your area of expertise... we want you to sew clothes for dogs'; and the rocket scientist Korolyov (who, it was claimed, was deeply attached to his canine cosmonauts), exhorting his fellow workers, 'Remember, Comrades, that a time will come when our trade unions will offer ordinary people holidays in space.'

And the little detail that Stryelka ('Little Arrow', part of the team (with Byelka) that first orbited the Earth and returned safely, had a puppy, Pushinka, that Khrushchev gave to JFK, ostensibly for his children, but obviously so that, every time he watched them play, Kennedy knew that Russia had got there first.

It's repeated a few times this month.