There are two reasons I couldn’t resist this book. First, I was born on Oct. 5, 1957, one day after the Soviet Union slingshotted the first satellite, Sputnik, into space. So I’m a true space age baby who grew up obsessed with the Cold War grudge match to reach the moon.

Second, I was a kid during the golden age of the half-hour dog drama: television series like “Lassie,” “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin” and “The Littlest Hobo.” If there had been a show called “Space Dogs,” I would have been planted in front of the screen, tongue contentedly lolling.

And in the Soviet Union, in a sense, there was such a televised spectacle. As Olesya Turkina, a research fellow at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, writes in “Soviet Space Dogs,” an image-stuffed book: “These dogs are the characters in a fairy tale that was created in the U.S.S.R.: They are the martyrs and saints of communism.”

Throughout the 1950s and into the ’60s, these canine cosmonauts — Laika and Mishka, Belka and Strelka, and many others — were strays plucked from the streets and alleys of Moscow, trained at the Institute of Aviation Medicine, then vaulted toward the heavens. As the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin — sounding a bit Zen for 1961 — is said to have joked, “Am I the first human in space, or the last dog?”