![]() ![]() ![]() When he died in 1983 at the relatively young chimp age of 25, there was disquiet at the idea that his skin might be stuffed and put on display at the Air and Space Museum. before being moved to North Carolina Zoo where there was a small colony of captive chimps. After his space flight, he spent almost 20 years alone at the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. When I first met Ham in 2007, he’d been dead for a quarter of a century. “I have never seen such terror on a chimp's face,” she told me. When, later on, she saw the footage of Ham recorded during his sixteen-minute ordeal and photographs taken upon recovering his capsule, she was horrified. When MR-2 took off on 31 January 1961, Goodall was in Africa, where she had recently started her research project on chimpanzees in what was to become Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. Dressed in a nappy, waterproof pants and spacesuit, fitted with sensors to monitor his heart rate, breathing and body temperature during flight, his handlers strapped him into a capsule that would sit inside the nosecone of the Mercury-Redstone 2 rocket. The purpose of this mission, according to a NASA press release issued on 28 January 1961, was to provide “a check of the craft’s environmental control and recovery systems” and “a first test of the functioning of the life support system during an appreciable period – nearly five minutes – of zero gravity.” In early 1961, Ham and the next five most promising primates were flown to Cape Canaveral in Florida to prepare for an experimental flight. Ham in his capsule, with his handler Edward Dittmer (left).
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