A day before a scheduled suborbital test flight, a Soviet test dog disappeared from the launch site. Her name was Smelaya. According to NASA's history of animal spaceflight, which documents this Soviet-era program, the people working on the launch worried that wolves living near the site would attack her before the mission could start. She returned on her own the following day, just before the launch. The flight went ahead as planned, and she flew with another dog named Malyshka.
Why the Soviet Union needed dogs to fly before any human did
