The story of the chimpanzee Ham, the first hominid to fly into outer space

61 years ago, on January 31, 1961, ham the chimpanzee he became the first hominid to fly into outer space and gave the US hope to carry astronauts off Earth.

Ham belonged to the Holloman aerospace medicine center (United States), where he learned to perform some basic functions to pilot the ship. Thanks to his training, Ham managed to reach a height of 253 kilometers and remained for seven minutes in a state of weightlessness.

The trip was made within the Mercury project to simulate what the first human astronaut would experience.. Liftoff on a Redstone 2 rocket was carried out without incident, but a problem in the rocket’s throttle controller provided an overspeed that would not be resolved until the liquid oxygen was exhausted.

The flight lasted 16 minutes and 39 seconds and the capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, 679 kilometers away from the takeoff point. The chimpanzee was rescued alive and, according to NASA, became the first “halo of hope” that in the near future men could travel to space.

And it is that, before Ham, the US space agency had already experimented, up to six times, with sending apes into outer space, however none of them could survive the trip.

Two months later, on April 12, the Soviet Union gave the bell with the first manned orbital flight starring Yuri Gagarin. The United States was unable to send an astronaut off Earth until May 9, with Alan Shepard, and it was only a suborbital flight. It would be John Glenn, already in May 1962, who would match Gagarin’s feat in orbital flight.

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