Before NASA could send human astronauts into space, a chimp named Ham was among the first to test the perilous journey.
The three-year-old chimp made history by becoming the first chimpanzee to fly to space, setting the way for the United States’ first successful launch of a human astronaut only months later.
Ham, whose name was an abbreviation for Holloman Aero Med, was born in July 1957 and moved from the French Cameroons in West Africa to Holloman US Air Force Base in New Mexico when he was two years old in 1959.
The bright chimp was trained to execute simple tasks, and the Air Force noted his intelligence and quick learning ability.
On January 31, 1961, Ham was launched from Cape Canaveral on NASA’s Mercury-Redstone rocket, but his mission did not go as planned.
Ham was supposed to reach an altitude of 115 miles and speeds of 440 mph, but mechanical issues caused the spacecraft to fly to 157 miles above Earth and achieve an astounding speed of 5857 mph.
NASA managed to regain control of the rocket, which landed 442 miles downrange rather than the targeted 290 miles, with a heavy splash landing in the Atlantic Ocean some 60 miles from the rescue ship.
During the 16.5-minute voyage in orbit, Ham endured 6.6 minutes of weightlessness, allowing him to complete lever-pulling chores and respond to flashing lights.
A medical examination revealed that he was slightly exhausted and dehydrated following his trips but generally in fair health.
While Ham’s successful mission allowed America’s first human astronaut, Alan B. Shepard Jr., to travel to space on May 5, 1961, the chimp’s post-space existence was, to say the least, gloomy.
Ham was placed on display at the Washington Zoo barely two years later, in 1963, where he had a lonely life.
In September 1980, he was relocated from the Washington Zoo to the North Carolina Zoological Park in Asheboro, where he resided until his death on January 17, 1983.
The 25-year-old monkey spent most of his existence as a spectacle and was almost completely alone for 17 years.
According to NASA, Ham’s skeleton was sent to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, while his other remains were put to rest outside the International Space Hall of Fame in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
However, Ham was not the only animal tested, as the deadly journey also included dogs, cats, and even jellyfish.
Albert I, a rhesus macaque, became the first animal to travel into space on June 11, 1948, aboard a V-2 Blossom.
Albert I flew from White Sands, New Mexico, for more than 39 miles before succumbing to asphyxia.
A year later, in 1949, three additional monkeys, Albert II, Albert III, and Albert IV, ascended into space. Nobody made it back alive.
Albert II perished on impact, while Albert III died in an explosion.
While Albert IV flew more successfully than his predecessors, he perished on impact. On August 31, 1950, another V-2 launch saw an unanesthetized mouse complete the journey but not survive.
The first monkey who survived a space journey
It wasn’t until September 1951 that NASA celebrated the success of returning a monkey home alive.
Yorick, also known as Albert VI, flew 44.7 miles in an Aerobee rocket with 11 other mice.
He survived the journey but perished two hours later, along with two of his mouse crewmates. Stress from overhearing in the capsule after landing is believed to have caused their deaths.
On May 22, 1952, Patricia and Mike, two Philippine monkeys, survived a 2000-mph flight at a height of 36 miles.
They were the first to reach such a high altitude and spent the rest of their lives at the National Zoological Park in Washington, DC.
Patricia died of natural circumstances two years later, and Mike died in 1967.
Dogs and Cats in Space
The Soviets first utilized mice, rats, and rabbits as one-way space travelers before switching to man’s best friend.
Between 1951 and 1952, nine dogs flew on the Soviet R-1 series, three of which flew twice.
Dezik and Tsygan were the first canine suborbital astronauts in 1951, and they survived; however, many other space-hounds did not.
Some dogs were rescued from the streets or abandoned in space, such as Laika, a stray in Moscow who was quickly packed into a metal container to fly aboard Sputnik 2, which was sent into orbit in November 1957.
Five hours into the journey, Laika succumbed to overheating, causing Sputnik 2 to burn up in the sky in April 1958.
Meanwhile, French scientists successfully sent the first cat, Félicette, into orbit in October 1963.
Turtles and jellyfish in orbit.
In 1968, the USSR launched Zond 5 with a menagerie of creatures, including turtles, wine flies, mealworms, plants, and other living materials, to fly around the Moon.
Following Apollo 11’s first human Moon landing, animals in space were confined to ‘biological payload,’ which mostly consisted of rabbits, turtles, insects, spiders, fish, and jellyfish.
Impacts of animals in space
NASA slaughtered many animals to make room for human missions and used them as test subjects to investigate the effects of weightlessness and radiation.
NASA asserts that scientists learned ‘a vast amount more from the animals than they could have learned without them.’
“Without animal testing in the early days of the human space program, the Soviet and American programs could have suffered great losses of human life,” according to NASA’s webpage.
“These animals rendered a service to their respective countries that no human could or would have provided. They sacrificed their lives and/or services in the sake of technical development, paving the way for humanity’s numerous expeditions into space.”