People wrote him letters, and some were answered by zoo staff signed with Ham’s fingerprint. NASAĪfter his flight, Ham lived for 20 years by himself, in a zoo in Washington DC. Ham clasps the hand of a member of the recovery team after exit from the capsule. The whole flight took 16 minutes from launch to return.
The rocket travelled at 9,000km/h, and reached an altitude of 251km. On January 31, 1961, Ham was launched into space, strapped into a capsule inside the nosecone of a Mercury-Redstone rocket. Ham showed great aptitude, and was selected the day before the flight. The chosen chimp would test life support systems and demonstrate that equipment could be operated during spaceflight.
The astrochimps were trained to pull levers, with a banana pellet as a reward and an electric shock to the feet for failure. He was captured and taken to an astronaut school for chimps at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.
Ham was born in 1957 in a rainforest in the Central African nation of Cameroon, then a French territory. Kennedy promised to land humans on the Moon by the end of the 1960s. The stakes became higher when US President John F. While the USSR focused on dogs, the US turned to chimpanzees as they were the most like humans.
