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Laika's Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog

Book by Kurt Caswell · 2 quotes · Dog, Laika, Space

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Laika's Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog Quotes

“In the tumbling roll of the satellite, the little window turning over and over on the world, Laika was looking at everything there is, everything there ever was, her eyes taking in starlight that traveled across oceans of time to reach her, light from distant galaxies, from across a billion years, and she was looking down on the living Earth from orbit, even if in a chaotic whirl of the satellite's motion, and she was the first to take in this view. She saw the Earth, the blue marble, fragile, vulnerable, a kind of spaceship itself floating in the black void, impossibly alone.”

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“In that moment they must have acknowledged, even if only privately, that Laika was both simultaneously alive and dead—a kind of Schrödinger's cat—that the capsule was a container inside which she was alive, but from which she would never escape. In that moment the window became a medium through which they might witness the drama of her end, if only they could follow her that far, and a medium through which they might imagine their own ends and the fate of our own capsule, the Earth, which will not last forever. Where Laika was going—into the stars, into death—the scientists and engineers knew they were going too. Like her, they would go alone, as we all must go one day.”

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