Rank 2 documents Sputnik 2 — the 508 kg conical spacecraft OKB-1 launched 3 November 1957, just one month after Sputnik 1, carrying Laika in the first biological orbit in history. The R-7 placed the monumental cone-and-instrument-section bus into a 212 × 1,660 km orbit for roughly 162 days — long enough to validate thermal control, telemetry, and life-support assumptions that Vostok would inherit four years later. Laika's mission remains ethically contested, but its engineering outcome was unambiguous: the Soviet Union could loft complex living payloads and track them across multiple orbit regimes. Constructivist linocut renders the side-profile capsule hero with porthole portrait, terracotta arch frame, and dense cream archive column exactly as the master PNG dictates.