SPACE is cold. So, when launching dogs for early space missions, Soviet rocket scientists chose strays like Laika that had survived on the streets during Moscow's freezing winter. Today, in contrast, some researchers working on an ambitious effort to dispatch craft to Alpha Centauri, the nearest solar system to Earth's, see the chill of space not as a hindrance to sending life from one such system to another, but rather as a way to do just that.
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