Laika began her life as a stray dog on the streets of Moscow and died in 1957 aboard the Soviet satellite Sputnik II. Initially the USSR reported that Laika, the first animal to orbit the earth, had survived in space for seven days, providing...
In the early 1970s, there was a small group of advocates for an infrared space telescope; however, the field of infrared astronomy was only a few years old, and no one had ever built a space-based observatory of the required complexity. Considering...