The other heroes of the space race: Chimpanzee 'Ham' never got over the experience

Being a pioneer or piloting prototypes is never easy. Fame or glory may await you, but it involves taking a huge risk. And if you are not a human but a test animal, your safety and well-being may not be the main priority. This maxim has been true of animals that participated in the space race. We all remember Laika, who was the first dog to make an orbital flight. In 1951, the Soviets began a training program for dogs and other animals destined for the space program. Most of the dogs were captured strays. They all had to meet a number of requirements, including being female. By not having to lift their legs to urinate, they could better adapt to the cramped space of the space capsule.

Laika was chosen for her docility and for not having shown claustrophobia problems. From the beginning it was known that she was going to be sacrificed. The Sputnik satellites did not have any system of return to Earth. Laika died when one of the panels to regulate the temperature inside the capsule failed and she had a cardiac arrest due to hyperthermia. Some of the following dogs were more fortunate. In some later Sputniks such as 5 or in the Vostok program, which would finally take Yuri Gagarin to be the first man in orbit, there was already an attempt to recover the dogs. Thus we know that other female dogs, such as Belka, Strelka, Zvyozdochka, Alfa or Zhulka, survived. It is estimated that up to 41 dogs participated in the Vostok program, of which 22 possibly died. All Soviet rockets and satellites were equipped with bombs programmed to detonate in case the landing took place outside Soviet soil. This was the sad fate of many of these animals.

Things were no better for the animals behind the Iron Curtain. NASA had a chimpanzee training program at the Holloman Aeromedical Research Laboratory in New Mexico for the Mercury missions. Chosen for the first experimental flight was a 3-and-a-half-year-old, 36-pound male named Chang. He had been captured and separated from his family at a very young age in Cameroon in 1959 and sold to the U.S. Air Force for $457. He was renamed Ham after the initials of the laboratory where he was trained. His selection was based on docility and performance in psychomotor training, tests in which the monkeys had to press the left or right lever in response to different flashing lights or be able to sit still for long periods. Everything was based on negative reinforcement or punishment. If they failed the training, they received an electric shock.

On the day of his space flight, January 31, 1961, Ham had a thermometer taped to his rectum and several electrodes attached to monitor his physiological response. The United States had previously carried out tests with monkeys using V2 missiles, and none had survived. To condition him, they had repeated the entire process of dressing him and taking him to the capsule several times, so that the process would be familiar to him and he would not fail on the big day. So he had experienced everything beforehand except the flight. During the flight, Ham was subjected to an acceleration equivalent to 17 times that of gravity, which caused him to lose his vision and at one point his heart rate to exceed 200 per minute. With the shaking, the shock system broke down, and continued to deliver shocks despite the fact that he was operating the levers correctly.

Ham did his part. He did it perfectly with his left hand and with very few mistakes with his right. The flight lasted 16 minutes, he landed in the sea and was rescued two hours later, when the capsule was about to drag him to the bottom of the ocean. As a reward for his services he received an apple and smiled, a photo that was immortalized by the press. However, when they tried to put him back in the capsule to take more photos, he had a panic attack and attacked his caretakers… normal. A hero does not have to be suicidal. Even if he is a monkey.

JM Mulet is a professor of Biotechnology.