Ham the chimpanzee flew to space before any US astronaut

Ham, a chimpanzee trained by the U.S. Air Force, became the first chimpanzee in space on January 31, 1961, riding a Mercury-Redstone 2 rocket on a 16.5-minute suborbital flight more than three months before Alan Shepard became the first American in space.

The flight was suborbital, not orbital. Ham is often described as having orbited Earth, and even the National Archives captions his photo “After Orbiting the Earth.” He did not. His capsule flew a ballistic arc out over the Atlantic and back down. The first American chimpanzee to reach orbit was Enos, in November 1961, ahead of John Glenn’s orbital flight.

Ham was there to work, not just ride. Born in 1957 in French Cameroon, he was one of 40 chimps chosen for the program and trained at Holloman Air Force Base to pull levers in response to lights and sounds: a correct response within five seconds earned a banana pellet, and a miss brought a mild shock to the soles of his feet. In flight his reaction times were only slightly slower than on the ground, evidence that an astronaut could still operate controls.

The mission nearly killed him. Technical problems sent the capsule to 157 miles at 5,857 mph, well beyond the planned 115 miles and 4,400 mph, and it came down 422 miles downrange instead of 290. The cabin partly lost pressure, and only the sealed, pressurized capsule encasing him averted disaster. After splashdown, water flooded in; had the helicopter arrived later, he might have drowned. He shook hands with the recovery ship’s commander and took an apple, but later, agitated by flashbulbs and crowding newsmen, snapped at several people.

Ham lived at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo until 1980, then at the North Carolina Zoo. He died in 1983, and his remains were buried at the International Space Hall of Fame in Alamogordo, New Mexico.