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 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. And, unlike many other unfortunate primates in the spaceflight program, Ham survived his mission and went on to have a long life.
“Ham proved that mankind could live and work in space,” reads his grave marker in New Mexico.
Miss Baker, a squirrel monkey, shown just before her flight to space in 1958 on a Jupiter rocket — an intermediate-range ballistic missile designed to carry nuclear warheads, not monkeys. Miss Baker and another monkey, a rhesus macaque named Able, both survived the flight and became the first animals the U.S. returned safely from space. (Credit: NASA)
