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Yuri Gagarin – poster boy of manned space flight

“To an observant outsider, the Soviets might have appeared to have developed an oddly intolerant attitude towards stray dogs. Every so often throughout the late 1950s, a fresh pack of homeless mongrel bitches was picked off the streets of Moscow and transported to a remote region of Kazakhstan, where they were promptly strapped into the nose of a ballistic missile and fired into space. If they survived till re-entry, they would likely be blown up by a remotely detonated on-board bomb designed to prevent their earthbound remains from falling into enemy territory. It was, as the phrase goes, a dog’s life.”
[…]
“Gagarin, himself appointed ‘first man’ only weeks before the launch date and sworn to silence on the point, has to explain to his mother that he will be going away for a while on a ‘work trip’. (‘Far away?’ she asks. ‘Very.’)”
[…]
“They were healthy men with sick doctors: technicians who subjected them to various scientific tortures such as the centrifugal ‘Vomit Comet’, or forced them to blow up children’s party balloons until they passed out. The American astronauts could also expect to encounter an instrument called the ‘steel eel’, and look forward to having as many as ‘six enemas a day’. ‘I didn’t know,’ said John Glenn, ‘that the human body had so many openings to explore.””

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/yuri-gagarin-poster-boy-of-manned-space-flight