Welcome to Unexplained Extra, with me, Rich of McLean, Smith.

Where for the weeks in between episodes, we look at the stories that for one reason or

other didn't make it into the show.

In last week's episode, coming to you live, we learned briefly about the launch of the

Telstar Satellite, which in July 1962 became the world's first active communication satellite

propelling us into a new media age of instantaneous global communication.

The satellite was just one of an extraordinary array of space firsts for humanity, which

had begun with the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, in 1957, and was followed

soon after by Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, becoming the first human in outer space in 1961.

Two years later, Valentina Teroshkova became the first woman in space, and only five years

after that, Neil Armstrong of NASA's Apollo 11 mission achieved the ultimate prize of

becoming the first human to step foot on the moon.

The moments symbolized by Gagarin and Armstrong are simply seismic achievements in the annals

of human history, and however future historians choose to condense our present age, their names

are unlikely to ever be excluded from the retelling of it.

What is less well known, however, is the story of those other animals who helped them,

and one in particular who became the first sentient creature to orbit the earth.

A stray dog plucked from the streets of Moscow that beat them all.

This is her story.

Though serious plans to put a human in space were circulating among rocket scientists

in the early 20th century, it wasn't until the development of the Fowl's Vi rocket,

also known as V2, during the Second World War, that it started to be considered as a genuine

...