Portal:Spaceflight/Selected biography/November 2008

Ham (July 1957 – January 19, 1983) was the first hominid launched into outer space. Ham's name is an acronym for the lab that prepared him for his flight — the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center, located at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. Ham was born in July 1957 in Cameroon, captured by animal trappers and sent to Rare Bird Farm in Miami, Florida. He was purchased by the United States Air Force and brought to Holloman Air Force Base in 1959. Officially, Ham was known as #65 before his flight, and only renamed "Ham" upon his successful return to Earth. This was reportedly because officials did not want the bad press that would come from the death of a named chimpanzee if the mission were a failure. Among his handlers, #65 had been known as Chop Chop Chang.

Ham was taught to push a lever within five seconds of seeing a flashing blue light. After training, he was launched on a sub-orbital spaceflight in order to determine whether he could function under the stress and pressure involved. On January 31, 1961, Ham was launched aboard Mercury-Redstone 2 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Ham's capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean and was recovered by a rescue ship later that day. The results from his test flight led directly to the Mercury-Redstone 3 mission which Alan Shepard later made on May 5, 1961. After the flight, Ham lived for 17 years in the National Zoo in Washington D.C., then at the North Carolina Zoo before dying at the age of 26 on January 19, 1983. (Ham, more...)