Here’s a look at the significance of sending animals to space

Ham it up

Jan. 31 marks the day Ham, a chimpanzee, was launched into sub-orbital space in a Mercury capsule aboard a Redstone rocket to become the first great ape in space.

On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space. However, three months earlier NASA had launched “Number 65” on a mission that helped pave the way for Shephard’s momentous flight. Number 65 was a male chimpanzee born in 1957 in the French Cameroons in West Africa. After being captured by trappers, he was sent to a rare bird farm in Florida. In 1959, he was sold to the U.S. Air Force, who sent him to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. There he would take part in training to become an astrochimp. Nicknamed “Ham” by his handlers (after Holoman Aerospace Medical Center), Number 65 was one of 40 chimps chosen for the space program.

Food for thought

During his preflight training, Ham was taught to push a lever within five seconds of seeing a flashing blue light; failure to do so resulted in an application of a light electric shock to the soles of his feet, while a correct response earned him a banana pellet.

Technical issue

The original flight plan called for an altitude of 115 miles and speeds ranging up to 4,400 mph. However, due to technical problems, the spacecraft carrying Ham reached an altitude of 157 miles and a speed of 5,857 mph and landed 422 miles downrange rather than the anticipated 290 miles. Ham experienced a total of 6.6 minutes of weightlessness during a 16.5-minute flight.

Ham’s flight on MR-2 was a significant accomplishment on the American route toward manned space flight. Now the Space Task Group knew that even with some hazardous malfunction it might reasonably hope to complete a manned ballistic mission successfully, which it did later in May.

Hall of famer

Ham gained instant fame, and was featured in numerous articles, on magazine covers and on television many times. Documentaries were made about him. He lived at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, DC until 1980, when he was transferred to the North Carolina Zoological Park in Asheboro. When he died in 1983 (age 26), Ham’s skeleton went to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology for further investigation. His other remains were buried at the International Space Hall of Fame in Alamogordo, New Mexico. A second astrochimp, Enos, was launched into space in November 1961, this time entering Earth orbit. It was the precursor to John Glenn’s orbital flight in 1962.

You can read more about animals in space on NASA’s site here.

Launch vehicles

Rocket technology has changed a lot since Ham went to space. Modern rockets such as the Pegasus are capable of being launched from an aircraft and taking small payloads into low Earth orbit. The larger Delta IV and Atlas V rockets are expected to be replaced by more powerful heavy-payload-capable rockets called Vulcans by 2019.

Sources: NASA, Space.com, Marshal Space Flight Center, Smithsonian Photos from NASA