On the morning of January 31, 1961, a three-year-old chimpanzee named Ham was strapped into a tiny capsule on top of a Mercury-Redstone rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida. He wore a special spacesuit, sat in a custom couch, and had been trained to push levers when blue lights flashed. If he pulled the right one, he got a banana pellet. If he goofed, he got a tiny zap on the foot. NASA wanted to know if a living creature could actually think and move during a rocket ride.
The engines roared, and Ham shot 157 miles up into space at over 5,800 miles per hour. For about six and a half minutes, he floated weightless inside the capsule, calmly pulling his levers right on cue, even as the rocket shook and his heart raced. When the capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, it landed off course and started taking on water, bobbing like a leaky bathtub. A rescue helicopter swooped in and scooped Ham out. The first thing he did when the hatch opened was reach for an apple.
Ham's flight proved that astronauts could survive a rocket ride and still do their jobs in space. Just months later, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, following Ham's exact path. Without one brave chimp pulling levers for banana pellets, the moon landings might have looked very different. Ham retired to a zoo and lived for another 22 years, a furry pioneer of the Space Age.
