![]() ![]() and the Soviet Union and briefly made Ham something of a star. The success of Ham’s flight helped ratchet up even further the already frantic contest for scientific and space supremacy between the U.S. ![]() Then the unassuming 37-pound primate went out and made aeronautic history: Aboard a NASA space capsule, traveling thousands of miles an hour almost 160 miles above the Earth, he became the first chimp in space. You can see the unedited film here (in which he is clearly extremely distressed at around 2:12), but I cannot find this on NASA’s website.On the morning of January 31, 1961, in south Florida, a 5-year-old chimpanzee dubbed “Ham” by his handlers ate a breakfast of baby cereal, condensed milk, vitamins and half an egg. Footage taken within the capsule during flight is usually edited, showing a relaxed and apparently happy Ham. NASA’s portrayal of Ham tends towards the heroic. But having spoken to Goodall, I realise it is more appropriate to render Ham differently, not as subject and hero but as object and victim, his life and afterlife a reminder of the ways in which humans are prepared to exploit those around us in pursuit of our own ambitions. When I have written about Ham in the past, I have tended to portray him in this way, as the subject and hero of the story, an animal whose journey I have used to capture the excitement of the human race for space. Ham was the first primate in space, exiting earth’s atmosphere some ten weeks ahead of Soviet pioneer Yuri Gagarin and over three months before Alan Shepard. Photograph: Henry Nicholls Photograph: Henry Nicholls ![]() This is all that remains of him, a disarticulated set of bones carefully laid out in a drawer behind the scenes at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in a northern suburb of Washington D.C.ĭrawer containing specimen 1871496 (aka Ham the Chimp) at the US National Museum of Health and Medicine. But they kept his skeleton for its “scientific value”. As a result of this kind of outcry, the US Air Force (to which Ham still belonged) agreed to bury him at the International Space Hall of Fame at the Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, New Mexico. “Talk about dreadful precedents – it should be enough to make any space veteran more than a little nervous about how he is going to be treated in the posthumous by and by.”Ī letter filed away in the Smithsonian Archives (in a folder of Ham-based correspondence), summed up the public mood: “By treating his body like that of a stupid beast, people will continue thinking of apes as stupid beasts, and not the intelligent, almost human animals they really are,” wrote a sophomore at West High School in Painted Post, New York. “Talk about death without dignity,” ran a leader in the Washington Post. When he died in 1983 at the relatively young chimp age of 25, there was disquiet at the idea that his skin might be stuffed and put on display at the Air and Space Museum. before being moved to North Carolina Zoo where there was a small colony of captive chimps. After his space flight, he spent almost 20 years alone at the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. ![]() When I first met Ham in 2007, he’d been dead for a quarter of a century. “I have never seen such terror on a chimp's face,” she told me. When, later on, she saw the footage of Ham recorded during his sixteen-minute ordeal and photographs taken upon recovering his capsule, she was horrified. When MR-2 took off on 31 January 1961, Goodall was in Africa, where she had recently started her research project on chimpanzees in what was to become Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. Dressed in a nappy, waterproof pants and spacesuit, fitted with sensors to monitor his heart rate, breathing and body temperature during flight, his handlers strapped him into a capsule that would sit inside the nosecone of the Mercury-Redstone 2 rocket. The purpose of this mission, according to a NASA press release issued on 28 January 1961, was to provide “a check of the craft’s environmental control and recovery systems” and “a first test of the functioning of the life support system during an appreciable period – nearly five minutes – of zero gravity.” In early 1961, Ham and the next five most promising primates were flown to Cape Canaveral in Florida to prepare for an experimental flight. Ham in his capsule, with his handler Edward Dittmer (left). ![]()
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