It was 50 years ago that astronaut Ham the Chimp made it into space ahead of Soviet pioneer Yuri Gagarin. To commemorate Ham’s historic space flight and subsequent life, I have a short piece in the G2 section of today’s Guardian but there’s so much more to say. Here is some of it:
The story, or my version of it at any rate, starts in 1957. You’ll recall that the Soviet Union had just triumphed with its Sputnik double-whammy, which propelled the first artificial satellite and then animal (Laika the dog) into space. At that moment, the US Air Force was the institution with its eye on space and just days before the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in July 1958, the Air Force negotiated a contract with animal collectors in the French Cameroons to source some chimps. Though these animals remained the property of the Air Force, they would end up as star experimental figures in NASA’s Project Mercury, which sought to put the first man into space.
In 1960, three members of the US Air Force flew out to the French Cameroons to get the chimps. This is how one of them remembered the animals for a feature published The Airman magazine in April 1962:
“When the chimps are captured, they are very small and usually range in age from 10 to 18 months…The natives tie them with strips of bamboo when they capture them and make no particular arrangements for holding or feeding the young animals. When the vendor, who sells them to us, finally obtains them, they are quite heavily parasitized and malnourished.”
Once in the US, the colony of 15 chimps spent several weeks in quarantine at the Holloman Air Force Base in Alamagordo, New Mexico before entering training for space flight. If Pete “Maverik” Mitchell was the Top Gun ace, then subject 65 or Ham was head of the class at the “School for Space Chimps” (as the insiders called it). He was fit, was comfortable being strapped into his “couch” and quickly learned the lever-pushing tasks required of him. “He was wonderful,” recalled his handler Edward Dittmer for a book entitled Animals in Space. “He performed so well and was a remarkably easy chimp to handle. I’d hold him and he was just like a little kid.”
In early 1961, Ham and the next five most promising primates were flown to Cape Canaveral in Florida to prepare for an experimental flight on 31 January. The purpose of this mission, according to a NASA press release issued on 28 January 1961, was to provide “a check of the craft’s environmental control and recovery systems” and “a first test of the functioning of the life support system during an appreciable period – nearly five minutes – of zero gravity.”
With just days to go, Ham got the nod and on the morning of the launch, he had a breakfast of oil, egg, cereal and condensed milk. Then his handler Dittmer dressed him in a nappy, waterproof pants and spacesuit; he fitted him with sensors to monitor his heart rate, breathing and body temperature during flight; and he sealed him into his capsule and helped load it onto the Mercury-Redstone 2 (MR-2) spacecraft.
Ham experienced weightlessness for more than six minutes of his sixteen-minute ordeal and some crushing forces on take-off and re-entry, but though clearly stressed seemed otherwise fine. The media coverage was massive, with headlines anticipating a manned flight in the spring. But a presidential advisory group reporting on the progress of Project Mercury was keen to avoid “the most expensive funeral man has ever had”. So US astronaut Alan Shepard did not fly on the next mission, which took place on 24 March 1961. Had he done so, the US would have won the race into space but on 12 April, Yuri Gagarin and the Soviet Union got there first.
If you’d like a visual version of Ham’s flight (and a gem of 1960s broadcasting), then check out this YouTube clip. “A hero of space, happy to be back among friends,” sings the narrator towards the end. “He has moved man closer than ever before to his age-old dream of travelling the heavens.” It’s rather a lovely piece.
Ham’s flight was certainly important, making it possible for Shepard’s sub-orbital flight on 5 May 1961 on board Freedom 7. But I’d like you to consider this: had Shepard been on the first manned mission into space, how would history remember Ham? My hunch is not at all. Shepard’s achievement would have eclipsed the chimp, relegating him to a mere footnote. As it was, Gagarin was the first into space on board Vostok-1 and the only way the US could claim victory was by bigging up Ham to such a degree that he became more human than chimp.
It’s of no surprise that Ham should have been anthropomorphised. He was a chimp after all, and we all know that from a genetic perspective chimps are essentially human. But the rest of Ham’s life was, by any chimp’s standards, pretty extraordinary. I’d like to illustrate this with some lovely archival material I have found relating to the rest of Ham’s life.
Following post-flight tests, Ham retired to something of a celebrity lifestyle at the US National Zoological Park (NZP) in Washington D.C. in 1963. At the Smithsonian Institution Archives, I found several folders relating to Ham’s stay at the zoo and lots of wonderful things in them.
For example, in December 1963 whilst Ham was presumably still getting used to his new abode, Andrew Swanston, a young British philatelist, mailed the zoo with a rather unusual request. “I write to you in the hope you can be so kind as to foot or hand print of Ham the Space Chimp on the front of the envelope I enclose.” I was so intrigued that I wrote to Mr Swanston last week, using the same address that he’d been living at almost 50 years ago. It was a long shot, I knew, but it turned out to be well worth the price of the stamp. I’ll write about this in due course, but I found him alive, well and in the same home. He also kindly gave me permission to show you the envelope that Ham autographed.
You will note that the envelope was franked on 31 January 1961 from Cape Canaveral, a feat achieved through some considerable cunning on Mr Swanston’s part (of which more later). Apart from Mr Swanston’s interesting letter, I found plenty of others. In 1968, a leap year, an anonymous correspondent sent Ham a Valentine’s card. “I mailed the others to Cape Kennedy now I’ve tracked you down,” she wrote. In it was a poem:
You’re minus an appendix,
gall bladder + one lung?
They took out half your thyroid
Has surgery just begun?
You’ll accept another person’s hearts?
A kidney not refuse?
They’re also welcome to your blood
Or you’ll let them transfuse?
And that is just a wig, you said
You have no hair upon your head?
They long ago took out your teeth?
Your corneas you will bequeath
But a competitor says “you’re mine”
Won’t you be my Valentine?
I discovered that at some stage in the late 1960s or early 1970s, the Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City seems to have purchased a chimp under the illusion it was Ham. “They have been displaying him as such for several years and are quite upset at having been bamboozled,” wrote the correspondent to the NZP. Presumably Chapultepec had paid full whack for their fraudulent chimp.
Ham is also supposed to have made several TV appearances and had a cameo in an Evel Knievel stunt movie. I did stick a post on the Ultimate Evel Knievel fan board in the hope of finding out which one, but in spite of considerable fan activity my query remains sadly unanswered.
In 1980 and vastly overweight, Ham moved to North Carolina Zoo, where there were other chimps and allegedly struck up a friendship with a much younger female called Maggie. When he died there in 1983 at the relatively young chimp age of 25, it was not in the most dignified fashion “slumped over with his back against the cage wall and his head bent toward his crotch”. Then again, what could be more fitting for an aging, overweight celebrity?