By BILL MOULAND

The right stuff: Ham is bolted into his capsule on top of the rocket that will blast him over 150 miles into space


He may sound like a comic book character from the age of Dan Dare, but Ham the astro-chimp had a serious purpose.

One of a squadron of 40 chimpanzees specially trained by the U.S. to make a monkey out of the Soviet Union’s attempt to win the space race, Ham made history 50 years ago as the first chimp to be launched into space.

With the Russians inching ever closer to the Holy Grail of sending a human into orbit, the Americans decided to use a three-year-old chimp — in the style of a gas-detecting canary in a mine — to find out whether humans would be able to survive in space.

The Soviet Union had previously sent dogs into space, but the U.S. chose chimps because of their similarities to humans.

Originally from Cameroon in Africa, and once the star attraction at a Florida zoo, Ham was purchased by the United States Air Force to boldly go where only fruit flies, rhesus monkeys and a dog called Laika had gone before.

Laika was a Russian hound who became the first animal to orbit the earth in November 1957 aboard the Sputnik 2 satellite. She survived for seven days before her oxygen ran out.

The difference with Ham — whose name was taken from the initials of the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center in New Mexico, where he was housed — was that he would not only go up into space, but also come down again safely.


Laid back: Ham appeared just as relaxed while preparing for take-off (left) as he did having come back down to earth


He and his fellow chimps were prepared for the flight for two-and-a-half 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.

Teams of white-coated scientists put the apes to the test on machines that measured the stresses they could cope with in terms of gravity, velocity and heat. They were even fed the diet of banana capsules that would sustain them in 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.


Testing time: Ham, wearing his military dog tags, undergoes medical tests


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.

The space race didn’t end with his flight, though. Although the Americans could claim 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.

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