“If the animal’s sensory or motor abilities are impaired so it cannot perform these tasks, we must assume that a man suffering the same impairment will be ineffective as a monitor of dials or a reporter of information.” “Before a man is lifted into space, we must learn whether an animal in space can perform tasks that it has learned on the ground,” an Air Force spokesman said. Little was known about the effects and stresses of weightlessness and high G forces, and whether astronauts could function-or even survive-in the environment of space. The first primate in space was Albert, a rhesus monkey who rode a US-launched V-2 rocket to an altitude of 39 miles in June 1948.Īs the prospect of human spaceflight drew near, the need for testing increased. Subjects included monkeys, mice, dogs, and in at least one instance, fruit flies. In the postwar period, the United States and Soviet Union conducted numerous experiments with animals carried aboard rockets. Fifty years later Ham is remembered-with the possible exception of Cheeta in the Tarzan movies-as the most famous chimpanzee of all time. His suborbital flight in Freedom 7 used the Redstone rocket and Mercury capsule validated by Ham. On May 5 (94 days after Ham), Alan Shepard became the first American astronaut in space. On April 12 (71 days after Ham’s flight), Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, made a full orbit of Earth in Vostok 1. 65, subsequently known as Ham, settles into his form-fitting “couch” before being launched on his suborbital flight.
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