Long before Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11 won the space race for the United States, the real stars of NASA were led by Ham and his fellow astro-chimps - the first Americans in space.
One of over a dozen chimpanzees trained by the U.S. to beat the Soviet Union’s attempt to win the space race, Ham made history over 50 years ago as the Cold War extended into orbit.
As the Russians moved closer to sending a human into orbit, the Americans decided to use three-year-old Ham — in a style reminiscent of a gas-detecting canary in a mine — to find out whether humans would be able to survive in space.
The most famous of all the chimps who were launched in Mercury space capsules that ultimately carried Alan Shepherd, the first American man into orbit, Ham was actually not named until after his January 1961 flight succeeded.
The name by which he’s now known — an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center at the Air Force base — was only used when he returned safely to earth.
This was because NASA reportedly wanted to avoid bad publicity should a named and therefore humanised animal be killed.
LIFE magazine's Ralph Morse — who photographed the Space Race and NASA astronauts for more than a decade — told LIFE .com that even 50 years later, he fondly recalls the astro-chimps
'Ham, especially, was a very friendly fellow,' he said. 'Those were great assignments, shooting the early years with NASA. You really got the sense that these were incredibly smart people just working their tails off to do something that had never been done before.'
The Soviet Union sent dogs into space in 1957, but the U.S. decided on chimps because of their genetic similarities to humans.
Originally from Cameroon in Africa, and once a star attraction for a Florida zoo, Ham was added to the astro-chimp team in the United States Air Force to go into space.
The difference between Ham and the Russian dogs was that he would not only go up into space, but also come down again safely.
He and his fellow chimps were prepared for the flight for almost three years, and taught to complete simple tasks in response to lights and sounds.
Pushing a lever within five seconds of seeing a flashing blue light earned him a banana pellet; failure gave him a mild electric shock to the soles of his feet.
'According to one story, which strict scientists contend is apocryphal,' LIFE magazine wrote at the time.
'A veterinarian gave a banana to a chimp before a rocket sled ride. As the animal peeled it, the ride started with a lurch and the monkey got the banana full in the face.
'The next time the chimp was offered a banana before a sled ride, he took, peeled it, and smeared it over the veterinarian’s face.'
Teams of scientists put the apes to the test on machines that measured if they could cope in with gravity, velocity and the heat of space.
On January 31, 1961, Ham was launched on Mission MR-2 — but almost immediately there was a hitch.
The flight path was a degree higher than it should have been, meaning the craft reached an altitude of 157 miles above the earth — higher than the planned target of 115, and oxygen levels began to drop.
For six minutes of the flight, Ham was weightless as the capsule sped across the sky at around 5,000mph.
It splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean 16 minutes and 39 seconds later, and when rescuers reached it, Ham gratefully accepted an apple and half an orange.
He was unharmed by his adventure, and went to live at the National Zoo in Washington for 17 years. He died at North Carolina Zoo at the age of 25 and is now buried at the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
The space race didn’t end with his flight, though.
Although NASA said that they had put a primate into space, the Russians argued that the flight was only sub-orbital — in other words, it hadn’t gone right round the world and did not count.
So, famously on April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin entered the history books when he became the first man in space aboard Vostok 1.
The Americans followed a month later on May 5 when Alan B. Shepard became their first astronaut. By then, Ham already had his feet up.
source: dailymail
Posts
