Ham the Astrochimp: The Involuntary Astronaut Who Got Zapped, Launched Too High, and Was Definitely Not Amused

On January 31, 1961, Ham the Astrochimp became the first hominid launched into space by the United States, though calling him a willing volunteer would be stretching the truth considerably. Ham—whose name was actually a cheeky acronym for the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center—had been captured in the French Cameroons as an infant and, through a series of events that would horrify modern ethicists, found himself strapped into a Mercury-Redstone 2 rocket at Cape Canaveral. NASA had trained him to pull levers in response to flashing lights, rewarding correct responses with banana pellets and incorrect ones with mild electric shocks to his feet, because apparently someone thought "operant conditioning via foot-zapping" was the pinnacle of space program sophistication. The flight was supposed to last 14.5 minutes and reach an altitude of 115 miles. Instead, due to various technical failures, Ham experienced a rather more exciting 16.5-minute journey that took him to 157 miles—substantially higher and faster than intended. The capsule's oxygen depleted, the temperature soared, and Ham pulled his levers with what one imagines was considerable irritation as g-forces twice as strong as planned crushed him into his specially designed couch. When the capsule splashed down in the Atlantic, it landed 130 miles off target and began taking on water. Ham waited in his flooding tin can for nearly three hours before rescue arrived. Upon extraction, handlers reported he was "in perfect health" though photographs show an animal whose facial expression can only be described as "profoundly unamused." Ham lived another 22 years in various zoos, never to return to space, which he presumably considered excellent news. This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI.