This is Ham, a chimpanzee trained by NASA who flew aboard the Mercury-Redstone 2 mission on January 31, 1961.
During the suborbital flight, Ham successfully performed tasks like pushing levers in response to lights, proving that a living being could function in space conditions.
His mission helped scientists understand how humans might behave during spaceflight, paving the way for the first human space missions later that year.
Ham safely returned to Earth and became one of the unsung pioneers of the early space age.
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Hopefully they sent him up with a sh!tload of Bananas!
As important as Ham’s contributions to space exploration were, he lived through absolute torture. He was trained to perform actions with electric shocks. If he performed an action at the indicated time, he would avoid the shock. During the space flight, the mechanism failed and he was just shocked repeatedly despite doing all the tasks he was supposed to. All while having anal probes inserted in him, if I’m not mistaken. It’s just…horrifying.
Jane Goodall, responding to seeing a famous picture of Ham “smiling” after his space flight, said, [“I have never seen such terror on a chimp’s face.”](https://www.theguardian.com/science/animal-magic/2013/dec/16/ham-chimpanzee-hero-or-victim)
I thought they were all one way trips. I’m glad they returned him!
A poem about HAM. https://www.sciencewritenow.com/read/lyric-poetic-scientific/space-chimps-i-property-of-holloman-aerospace-medical
“No, I don’t think we’ll be telling them that.”
Skates away
They trained him using a button system that dispensed bananas when he input the right command sequence. NASA did pioneering work in the field of banana preservation that has been adopted industry wide to stabilise banana ripeness when in transit.
This monkey’s gone to heaven