A reader writes:
Speaking of plaques in space, you might be interested in the [above] video. It’s a little YouTube production I threw together using a radio interview I conducted during my undergrad days in J-school. I had taken a “History of Space Flight” course taught by Hans Mark at the University of Texas at Austin. That’s where I heard him recount the story of Carl Sagan calling him up and pitching the idea of fastening a plaque to Pioneer 10 to potentially someday communicate with an alien intelligence.
Another reader:
There is another name missing from both the moon plaque and the Space Mirror Memorial. And her death was known about at the time. Her name is Laika:
Laika, a stray dog from the streets of Moscow, was originally named Kudryavka (Кудрявка, Little Curly). She underwent training with two other dogs, and was eventually selected to be the occupant of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 that was launched into outer space on November 3, 1957.
Laika died within hours after launch from overheating, possibly caused by a failure of the central R-7 sustainer to separate from the payload. The true cause and time of her death were not made public until 2002; instead, it was widely reported that she died when her oxygen ran out on day six, or as the Soviet government initially claimed, she was euthanized prior to oxygen depletion.
The experiment aimed to prove that a living passenger could survive being launched into orbit and endure weightlessness, paving the way for human spaceflight and providing scientists with some of the first data on how living organisms react to spaceflight environments.
The Dish 