Meet the Real Ham

HAM was a four-year-old chimp who was sent into space on a Mercury-Redstone rocket in January 1961. The folks who ran the space program wanted to send a monkey up in a rocket before sending a person, to make sure it was safe and to see how well he’d be able to function during the flight.

This picture shows HAM just after he’d returned to Earth, splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean. He’s being greeted by the commander of the recovery ship that pulled his space capsule out of the water. 

HAM facts:

• HAM was named after the lab that trained him for his mission, the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center.
• He was trained to push a lever within five seconds of seeing a flashing blue light. If he got it right, he got a banana pellet. If he got it wrong, he got a mild electric shock on the soles of his feet.
• It took two months to train HAM, but he wasn’t the only one in the program. There were five other chimpanzees that all had equal shots of going into space. HAM was chosen on the very last day, after the chimps were all tested and given medical examinations.
• During the flight, HAM wore a spacesuit and was hooked up to monitors so that the scientists back on Earth could keep track of his vital signs, like heart rate and temperature.
• His entire flight was only 16 minutes and 39 seconds long, and he was weightless for seven of those minutes.
• Less than a year later, another chimp named Enos was launched into space and orbited all the way around the Earth (something HAM didn’t do).
• HAM retired from the space program and lived out the rest of his life in zoos, first at Washington, D.C.’s National Zoo, where he lived for 17 years, and then at the North Carolina Zoo, where he lived until his death in 1983.