"He can't make any decisions, we might as well have a robot up there," says Major Nelson. They are envious that Sam gets to go to the Moon before them. In the I Dream of Jeannie episode "Fly me to the Moon" (1967), astronauts Tony Nelson and Roger Healey train Sam the chimp for spaceflight. Well none of us wants to think that they're going to send a monkey up to do a man's work … what they're trying to do to us is send a man up to do a monkey's work. In a scene from the 1983 film The Right Stuff, based on Tom Wolfe's book for which he did extensive interviews with the astronauts, one says: The astronauts of the 1960s Mercury program felt their masculinity threatened by performing the same tasks as chimps. Pilot Jerrie Cobb said she would take the place of one of the chimps if it meant having a shot at space. While the chimps were in training at the Holloman Airforce Base, women were actively excluded from spaceflight. "Ham" was an acronym for Holloman Aero Medical, but as American philosopher of science Donna Haraway has pointed out, "Ham's name inevitably recalls Noah's youngest and only black son". Ham sits at an interesting intersection of race, gender and species. ( Supplied: NASA) Cyborg and simian, man and machine Ham clasps the hand of a member of the recovery team after exit from the capsule. The National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington DC retains his bones. Ham's flesh was stripped from his skeleton, cremated, and buried at the Space Hall of Fame in Almogordo, New Mexico. He died in 1983 at the age of 26.Ī proposal to stuff and display his body was abandoned after an outcry. In 1980 he was sent to another zoo to live with a group of chimps. People wrote him letters, and some were answered by zoo staff signed with Ham's fingerprint. Ham's treat on emerging from the spacecraft was an apple, which he devoured eagerly.Īfter his flight, Ham lived for 20 years by himself, in a zoo in Washington DC. Fortunately, the helicopter recovery team reached him in time. Ham survived the flight itself, but nearly drowned when the capsule started filling with water after its ocean splashdown. Jane Goodall, an expert in primate behaviour, said she had never seen such terror in a chimp's expression. The biomedical data showed Ham experienced stress during acceleration and deceleration. He experienced 6.6 minutes of free fall and 14.7g of acceleration on descent - much greater than predicted. He achieved this with a 16cm rectal thermometer in place to monitor his temperature. He received two shocks for not doing this correctly, out of 50 pulls. Throughout the journey Ham was obliged to pull a lever. Ham with one of his handlers on the day of the spaceflight. The whole flight took 16 minutes from launch to return. The rocket travelled at 9,000km/h, and reached an altitude of 251km. On January 31, 1961, Ham was launched into space, strapped into a capsule inside the nosecone of a Mercury-Redstone rocket. Ham showed great aptitude, and was selected the day before the flight. The chosen chimp would test life support systems and demonstrate that equipment could be operated during spaceflight. The astrochimps were trained to pull levers, with a banana pellet as a reward and an electric shock to the feet for failure. He was captured and taken to an astronaut school for chimps at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. Ham was born in 1957 in a rainforest in the Central African nation of Cameroon, then a French territory. Kennedy promised to land humans on the Moon by the end of the 1960s. The stakes became higher when US President John F. While the USSR focused on dogs, the US turned to chimpanzees as they were the most like humans. She died, but from overheating rather than the effects of space travel itself. The Soviet Union sent the dog Laika into orbit on Sputnik 2 in 1957. Plants, insects and animals had been taken to high altitudes in balloons and rockets since the 18th century. The science fiction writer and warfare expert Cordwainer Smith wrote about the psychological pain of being in space. In the 1950s, it was unclear whether humans could survive outside Earth - both physically and mentally. In this process, he became the first hominin in space. On January 31, 1961, an intrepid chimpanzee called Ham was launched on a rocket from Cape Canaveral in the United States, and returned to Earth alive.
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