Ham the Astrochimp — The First Hominid in Space

In July of nineteen fifty-nine, a young chimpanzee was transferred to Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo as part of a government program to determine whether higher primates could survive spaceflight. He was designated Chimpanzee Number Sixty-Five, and he and roughly sixty other chimpanzees were housed at the base and trained to perform simple tasks in response to light and sound signals, pushing levers and responding to cues while enduring the physical conditions of acceleration, vibration, and weightlessness simulated in centrifuges. After about fifteen months of training, Number Sixty-Five was selected.

On January thirty-first, nineteen sixty-one, he was placed in a spacecraft called Mercury-Redstone Two and launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a suborbital trajectory that carried him to an altitude of about one hundred fifty-seven miles. The flight lasted sixteen minutes. He performed his assigned tasks throughout and survived in good health, demonstrating that higher primates could endure the conditions of space travel and continue to function purposefully.

After his successful return, he was given a name. Ham was an acronym derived from the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center, the Alamogordo laboratory that had prepared him for the mission. He became Ham the Astrochimp, and his photograph appeared in newspapers around the world.

Ham lived until nineteen eighty-three. His remains are buried outside the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, in a small plot beneath a commemorative marker.