Ham clasps the hand of a member of the recovery team. Ham’s treat on emerging from the spacecraft was an apple, which he devoured eagerly. Ham survived the flight itself, but nearly drowned when the capsule started filling with water after its ocean splashdown.įortunately, the helicopter recovery team reached him in time. Jane Goodall, an expert in primate behaviour, said she had never seen such terror in a chimp’s expression. The biomedical data showed Ham experienced stress during acceleration and deceleration. ![]() He experienced 6.6 minutes of free fall and 14.7_g_ of acceleration on descent – much greater than predicted. Photo: NASA Throughout the journey Ham was obliged to pull a lever.He received two shocks for not doing this correctly, out of 50 pulls.He achieved this with a 16cm rectal thermometer in place to monitor his temperature. Ham with one of his handlers on the day of the spaceflight. The whole flight took 16 minutes from launch to return. The rocket travelled at 9000km/hr, and reached an altitude of 251km. On January 31, 1961, Ham was launched into space, strapped into a capsule inside the nose-cone 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 astro-chimps were trained to pull levers, with a banana pellet as a reward and an electric shock to the feet for failure.
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