Ham’s successful spaceflight
Those traits would pay off during the mission. Following his launch on Jan. 31, 1961, Ham’s Mercury capsule unintentionally carried him far higher and faster than NASA intended. His capsule also partially lost air pressure, though the chimp was unharmed because he was sealed inside an inner chamber.
We’ll never know what Ham was thinking during his six and a half minutes of weightlessness. But, like the later human Mercury astronauts, Ham could have seen out of the capsule’s small porthole window.
As far as his mission was concerned, Ham successfully pulled his lever at the proper time, performing only a tad slower than he had during practice runs on Earth. By simply tugging on a lever, Ham proved that human astronauts could perform basic physical tasks in orbit, too.
Roughly 16 and a half minutes after launch, Ham splashed down in the ocean. And although the capsule took on some water while recovery crews converged, the chimp seemed unfazed once aboard the rescue ship USS Donner — even shaking the commander’s hand. Ham eventually became the subject of documentaries and cartoons and graced the covers of national magazines.
He lived out the rest of his life in the North Carolina Zoo, where he died in 1983 at age 25.
Following Ham, just one other chimp would ever journey to space. Enos, who was also bought from the Miami Rare Bird Farm and trained alongside Ham, orbited Earth on Nov. 29, 1961. He was the third hominid to circle our planet, following cosmonauts Gagarin and Gherman Titov.
In the decades since, many other types of monkeys have flown to space on U.S., Russian, Chinese, French and Iranian spacecraft. NASA continued sending monkeys to orbit all the way into the 1990s, when pressure from animal rights groups, including PETA, pushed the space agency to reexamine the ethics of such research. As a result, NASA pulled out of the Bion program, a series of joint missions with Russia that was intended to study the impact of spaceflight on living organisms.
“These animals performed a service to their respective countries that no human could or would have performed,” says NASA’s history of animals in spaceflight webpage. “They gave their lives and/or their service in the name of technological advancement, paving the way for humanity’s many forays into space.”