i'll have a vacation starting by tomorrow, going to brussels and amsterdam, until 2008. friends, have a merry christmas and happy new year**
recently i watched "I am Legend", i like this film especialy the loneliness and the destiny of will smith. the atmosphere in the movie is really desperate. i kept recalling the dog in the movie after watching the movie, is it more desperate to have a dog as a friend rather then having someone else?
found 2 old photos in 2005:
some recent snaps here.
do you know this dog?
her name is laika, she is the first living creature to go to the space, on 3rd, november, 1957.
she was a stray wandering the streets of moscow, being selected from an animal shelter as the first space dog.
she died just after the take-off, because of overheat and stress from fear. and even she could go through all these, the capsule is not designed to be retrievable, that means, laika is destined to die.
laika's capsule stayed in the orbit for more then 5 months, then burning up in the atmosphere on april 14, 1958. "to anyone watching the sky at that time, she made her final statement as a tiny falling star in the night."
she is one of the most famous dog, there're even monuments of her in former USSR, there's a UK band named "laikia", their CD covers are usually laika-and-space-related.
i'm sure she doesn't care about all these.
"the more time passes, the more i'm sorry about it. we shouldn't have done it....we did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog."
(1998, Oleg Gazenko, one of the lead scientists of the Soviet animals-in-space programme.)
there's a comic book about the programme and laika at page one, i read a bit yesterday, but i couldn't continue after several pages because it's dreadful to know that such a nice dog was "destined to die". in that comic laika is very cute.
photos and references from wikipedia.
