Air and Space Museum-(L’Enfant Plaza) public art

I was on the metro the other day on my way to a new meet-n-greet and at  L’Enfant Plaza stop I saw two really fun photographs of  Weimaraners in NASA suits.  It sparked my interest and being by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum I wondered if that was the dog I had heard of that first went into space before humans.  Well, after investigation the dog is not what I was thinking rather a public art piece commissioned by NASA Art Program and were primarily funded by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities in partnership with the Metro Art in Transit Program. NASA teamed up with renowned photographer and artist William Wegman, famed for his popular images of Weimaraner dogs acting out in human situations, Wegman put his subjects in a space suit loaned by NASA. The finished photos of dogs floating in microgravity are displayed on a pair of circular murals in the L’Enfant Plaza Station, one of the busiest stops of the DC Metro system.

Image Credit: Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority

After researching the dog in the NASA outfit I came across Laika (my original thought as to what the dog in the metro could be) who was the first living mammal to orbit the Earth and the first orbital casualty.  Laika, the first animal ever sent to space, rode to orbit in Sputnik II on the 3rd of November, 1957. Several countries issued stamps honoring Laika. Laika is quite an interesting piece of Soviet cosmonautic history….

Little was known about the impact of space flight on living things at the time Laika’s mission was launched. Some scientists believed humans would be unable to survive the launch or the conditions of outer space, so engineers viewed flights by non-human animals as a necessary precursor to human missions.^[1] The United States used chimpanzees; the Soviet program elected to use dogs. Laika, a stray, originally named Kudryavka (Russian: кудрявка Little Curly-Haired One), underwent training with two other dogs, and was eventually chosen as the occupant of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 that was launched into outer space on November 3, 1957. Sputnik 2 was not designed to be retrievable, and Laika had always been intended to die.^[2]

Laika died a few hours after launch, presumably from stress and overheating, probably due to a malfunction in the thermal control system. The true cause and time of her death was not made public until 2002; instead, it was widely reported that she lived for several days.^[3] However, the experiment proved that a living passenger could survive being launched into orbit and endure weightlessness. It paved the way for human spaceflight and provided scientists with some of the first data on how living organisms react to spaceflight environments. On April 11, 2008, Russian officials unveiled a monument to Laika. A small monument in her honor was built near the military research facility in Moscow which prepared Laika’s flight to space. It features a dog standing on top of a rocket.^[4][5]

source- wikipedia

Some believed Laika was a Heroine that lead the way for human space exploration, but there is also a lot of controversy regarding her death, more so in America than in Russia.  The mission sparked a debate across the globe on the mistreatment of animals and animal testing in general to advance science. It was not until 1998, after the collapse of the Soviet regime, that Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists responsible for sending Laika into space, expressed regret for allowing her to die:

Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. 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.^[3][20]