![]() Unlike his predecessor, Albert II succeeded in becoming the first monkey to survive a launch and reach space. Unfortunately, on his journey home, Albert II died when the capsule’s parachute failed. His spacecraft left a 10-foot-wide crater in the New Mexico desert. In 1951, the Air Force finally managed to keep a monkey - this one named Albert VI - alive through both launch and landing. But his capsule failed to reach the boundary of space, leaving him out of the record books. The honor of first primates to survive a return trip to space goes to a squirrel monkey named Miss Baker, and a rhesus macaque named Able. The pair were launched in 1959 on a Jupiter rocket, an intermediate-range ballistic missile designed to carry nuclear warheads, not monkeys. Sadly, Able died just days after returning to Earth due to complications from a medical procedure. While America was struggling to send monkeys into space, their adversaries were racking up animal success stories. Rather than monkeys, the Soviet Union preferred to crew their early spacecraft with stray dogs. And by the time of Miss Baker’s and Able’s trip, the country had already safely launched and landed dozens of canines. (Though they also experienced a number of gruesome dog deaths.) NASA’s astronaut chimpsīy the early 1960s, the U.S. Was ready for its first real human spaceflight program, Project Mercury. ![]() But instead of monkeys - or humans - the nascent National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided its inaugural class of astronauts would be chimps. Monkeys, chimps and humans are all primates. However, chimpanzees and humans are both hominids, which means we’re much more closely related. In fact, humans share more DNA with chimps than with any other animal.īeyond their genetic similarities to humans, chimps are also incredibly smart and have complex emotions. This is why NASA figured that if chimps could endure the trip beyond Earth’s atmosphere in primitive early space capsules, there was a good chance a human astronaut could survive the journey, too. And, whereas monkeys and dogs had been mere passengers, NASA needed a test subject with the intelligence and dexterity to actually prove it could operate a spacecraft.Īs NASA put it: “Intelligent and normally docile, the chimpanzee is a primate of sufficient size and sapience to provide a reasonable facsimile of human behavior.”Īll told, the U.S. government acquired 40 chimps for its Mercury program. He had been captured by trappers in the French Cameroons and taken to the Miami Rare Bird Farm in Florida. From there, Ham and others were soon sold to the military and transferred to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. The chimps received daily training, including some of the same G-force exposure simulations as their human Mercury 7 counterparts. ![]() But, most importantly, handlers taught Ham and the other chimps to pull a lever every time a blue light came on. ![]()
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