On January 31, 1961, Ham the Chimp made history by becoming the first hominid in space. Ham, whose name stands for "Holloman Aerospace Medical Center," was a chimpanzee trained for space travel as part of NASA's Mercury program.
The Mercury-Redstone 2 (MR-2) mission, carrying Ham, was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard the Mercury-Redstone 2 rocket. The primary objective of this mission was to test the safety and feasibility of sending a living organism into space and recovering it safely.
Ham's role during the mission was to perform simple tasks in response to visual and audio cues. He was trained to pull levers within a specified time after seeing a flashing light. The successful completion of these tasks was an indication that a living being could function in the weightlessness of space and perform tasks necessary for a human astronaut's safety.
The MR-2 flight lasted approximately 16 minutes and 39 seconds, reaching a maximum altitude of 157 miles (252 kilometers). Ham experienced about 6.6 minutes of weightlessness during the flight. The spacecraft successfully re-entered Earth's atmosphere, and Ham's capsule was recovered by the USS Donner.
Ham's mission provided valuable data that contributed to the understanding of how living organisms respond to the conditions of space travel. His successful journey paved the way for subsequent human spaceflights in the Mercury and subsequent space programs.
After the mission, Ham lived at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., before being transferred to the North Carolina Zoo, where he lived until his death in 1983. Ham's contributions to early space exploration are commemorated in the annals of space history.
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