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- On Jan. 31, 1961 — a few months before Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering flight — Ham became the first hominid in space. Other nonhominid animals had ventured into space before Ham, but he and his fellow “astrochimps” were trained to pull levers and prove it was physically possible to pilot the Project Mercury spacecraft.
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Apr 21, 2020 · Apr 21, 2020 3:14 PM. NASA trained 40 “astrochimps” — including this one, named Ham — to pilot their Mercury-Redstone spacecraft. Not long after Ham’s successful mission in 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American human to reach space. (Credit: NASA)
Jan 18, 1998 · American and Russian scientists utilized animals—mainly monkeys, chimps and dogs—in order to test each country’s ability to launch a living organism into space and bring it back alive and unharmed. On June 11, 1948, a V-2 Blossom launched into space from White Sands, New Mexico carrying Albert I, a rhesus monkey.
Ham, a chimpanzee, became the first great ape in space during his January 31, 1961, suborbital flight aboard Mercury-Redstone 2. Before humans went into space in the 1960s, several other animals were launched into space, including numerous other primates, so that scientists could investigate the biological effects of spaceflight.
Ham (July 1957 – January 19, 1983), a chimpanzee also known as Ham the Chimp and Ham the Astrochimp, was the first great ape launched into space. On January 31, 1961, Ham flew a suborbital flight on the Mercury-Redstone 2 mission, part of the U.S. space program's Project Mercury.
Apr 21, 2020 · NASA. Long before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin famously set foot on the Moon, the hero of America’s human spaceflight program was a chimpanzee named Ham. On Jan. 31, 1961 — a few months before...
Feb 2, 2021 · NASA. On January 31, 1961, an intrepid chimpanzee called Ham was launched on a rocket from Cape Canaveral in the United States, and returned to Earth alive. In this process, he became the first...
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.
