8/15/2023 0 Comments Ham chimpanzee space![]() ![]() In a scene from the 1983 film The Right Stuff, based on Tom Wolfe’s book for which he did extensive interviews with the astronauts, one says: The astronauts of the 1960s Mercury program felt their masculinity threatened by performing the same tasks as chimps. Pilot Jerrie Cobb said she would take the place of one of the chimps if it meant having a shot at space. While the chimps were in training at the Holloman Airforce Base, women were actively excluded from spaceflight. “Ham” was an acronym for Holloman Aero Medical, but as American philosopher of science Donna Haraway has pointed out, “Ham’s name inevitably recalls Noah’s youngest and only black son”. Ham sits at an interesting intersection of race, gender and species. The whole flight took 16 minutes from launch to return. The rocket travelled at 9,000km/h, and reached an altitude of 251km. On January 31, 1961, Ham was launched into space, strapped into a capsule inside the nosecone of a Mercury-Redstone rocket. Ham showed great aptitude, and was selected the day before the flight. ![]() The chosen chimp would test life support systems and demonstrate that equipment could be operated during spaceflight. The astrochimps were trained to pull levers, with a banana pellet as a reward and an electric shock to the feet for failure. He was captured and taken to an astronaut school for chimps at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. ![]() Ham was born in 1957 in a rainforest in the Central African nation of Cameroon, then a French territory. Kennedy promised to land humans on the Moon by the end of the 1960s. The stakes became higher when US President John F. While the USSR focused on dogs, the US turned to chimpanzees as they were the most like humans. ![]()
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