Not long ago, though, when space travel was still one of humanity's most epic and frantic goals, the concept itself -- sending a man into space! -- alarmed people. Particularly those people who were responsible for making the travel happen in the first place. Space was tantalizingly, terrifyingly new -- and we simply did not know what would happen to an earthly body when it was shot outside of the Earth itself. There were legitimate fears of radiation poisoning. There were less-legitimate fears of "space madness." There were concerns about the considerable psychic and political consequences should something go wrong. The Soviets, like their American counterparts, wanted to be first to space -- but they wanted, more specifically, to be the first to make it back again. Gagarin had to make his historical orbit around the Earth; he then, just as importantly, had to return to Earth intact. No other outcome would be tolerable.

So the engineers of the U.S.S.R. tested and then re-tested and then re-tested their technology. And, to make sure space travel was as safe as possible for organic creatures like themselves, they sent fellow animals -- mice and cats and dogs and chimps -- as sacrifices to the cause of space. Ivan Ivanovich was the culmination of that testing: He was as human-looking a thing as they could send short of sending a human. And he had an important job to do. The Korabl-Sputnik satellite -- the spacecraft that would carry Ivan and, later, Gagarin into space -- wasn't equipped for soft landings. It required its passenger to eject sometime after re-entry into Earth and sometime before collision with it. A parachute, it was hoped, would take care of the rest. To convert that "hope" into considerably-more-reassuring "expectation," Ivan would take two flights: the first, on March 9, and the second, on March 25. He would operate as a high-tech crash-test dummy.

And so, for a few heady weeks in 1961, all the hopes and fears of space's vast new frontier were embodied, quite literally, by a doll. If Ivan failed, leaders might conclude that it wouldn't be worth the risk of swapping him out for a human. If he succeeded, though, all systems were go. Gagarin -- and all those who would follow him -- could launch. Ivan was, Joyce Chaplin writes in her book Round About the Earth, "a dummy human to represent the human space travelers to come."

'So Much Like a Human Being'

Ivan was made, for the most part, of metal, with bendable joints that allowed for ease when it came to dressing him and situating him within his tiny spacecraft. He had "skin" of synthetic leather. His detachable head -- engineers connected it to his body through his open helmet -- was made primarily of metal, too. Ivan was, and this was the whole point, humanoid.