After his flight, Ham lived for 20 years by himself, in a zoo in Washington DC. People wrote him letters, and some were answered by zoo staff signed with Ham’s fingerprint. In 1980 he was sent to another zoo to live with a group of chimps. He died in 1983 at the age of 26.
A proposal to stuff and display his body was abandoned after an outcry. But he did undergo a postmortem. Ham’s flesh was stripped from his skeleton, cremated, and
buried at the Space Hall of Fame in Almogordo, New Mexico. The National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington DC retains his bones.
Cyborg and simian, man and machine
Ham sits at an interesting intersection of race, gender and species. “Ham” was an acronym for Holloman Aero Medical, but as American philosopher of science Donna Haraway has pointed out, “Ham’s name inevitably recalls Noah’s youngest and only black son”.
While the chimps were in training at the Holloman Airforce Base, women were actively excluded from spaceflight. Pilot Jerrie Cobb said she would
take the place of one of the chimps if it meant having a shot at space.
The astronauts of the 1960s Mercury program felt their masculinity threatened by performing the same tasks as chimps. In a scene from the 1983 film The Right Stuff, based on Tom Wolfe’s book for which he did extensive interviews with the astronauts, one says:
Well none of us wants to think that they’re going to send a monkey up to do a man’s work … what they’re trying to do to us is send a man up to do a monkey’s work.
In the I Dream of Jeannie episode “Fly me to the Moon” (1967), astronauts Tony Nelson and Roger Healey train Sam the chimp for spaceflight.
They are envious that Sam gets to go to the Moon before them. “He can’t make any decisions, we might as well have a robot up there,” says Major Nelson.
This refers to an ongoing battle among both Soviet and US astronauts about how much autonomy they would have as pilots. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, being controlled by machines was felt to diminish masculinity.
Chimps in space also threatened the accepted evolutionary order. In some versions of the famous “March of Progress” illustration of human evolution, the first figure is a knuckle-walking ape and the last is an astronaut. Ham was leapfrogging to the front of the evolutionary queue in a Planet of the Apes-style interspecies competition.
Ham’s spaceflight made him more than animal, but still less than human.
A mere 10 weeks after Ham’s feat, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space when he orbited Earth on April 12. On November 26, Enos the chimp completed an orbit.
We don’t send animals into orbit any more as proxies for human experience. But there is one chimp still in space. The calls of a wild chimp were recorded on the Voyager Golden Records, now heading out beyond the Solar system.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.