![]() ![]() Three days before the new target date, November 29, 1961, the Air Force team designated Enos as the prime candidate for NASA’s mission, with several of his compatriots as backups. Technical problems pushed the launch back several weeks. The chief veterinarian described him as "quite a cool guy and not the performing type at all."Įnos looks relaxed as he is prepared for launch. One of the new arrivals was Enos, a native of Cameroon in west central Africa, who had been purchased by the Air Force from a Florida wildlife center in 1960. In October 1961, personnel from Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico, brought three more chimpanzees to Cape Canaveral to join two already there. Despite questions from the press and from the office of NASA Administrator James Webb, Project Mercury officials under Robert Gilruth confirmed that MA-5 would be a chimp flight. The doctors were also still worried about the effects of extended weightlessness on an astronaut and the engineers wanted another test of the cabin environment. The MA-4 flight had worked, but there were numerous technical problems with the spacecraft and the booster that needed investigating and fixing, delaying the next mission. The MA-5 capsule is currently on loan at the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science in Durham, North Carolina.Ĭaution once again prevailed, as NASA’s confidence in the capsule and the rocket were not very high. The chimpanzee "Enos" made two orbits in this capsule on the Mercury-Atlas 5 (MA-5) mission. ![]() The question then became, could an astronaut fly on the next mission, MA-5? At least the United States could orbit someone in the same year as the Soviets. The spacecraft carried a “spaceman simulator”-a device to test the cabin environmental control system. Fortunately, the launch escape system salvaged the Mercury capsule, which was re-flown successfully on Mercury-Atlas 4 (MA-4) in mid-September. During the first launch attempt that year, 13 days after Gagarin’s triumphant mission on April 12, 1961, the range safety officer blew up the uncrewed Mercury-Atlas 3 (MA-3) when the rocket’s guidance system failed. Project Mercury’s transition to the larger Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), which would put astronauts into orbit, was lagging. Two American astronauts, Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, had also gone into space, but they had only made short suborbital journeys like Ham. Two cosmonauts had circled the Earth that year: Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, and Gherman Titov, who had orbited for a full day in August 1961. once again was embarrassingly behind the Soviet Union in spaceflight spectaculars. ![]() Ham, who was visibly agitated by his rough flight and by the flashing press cameras afterward, became a celebrity.īy the time Enos flew, the U.S. Doctors had a lot of (exaggerated) concerns about the impact of spaceflight on the human body and psyche engineers wanted to prove the safety of the Mercury capsule. Launched on Mercury-Redstone 2 on January 31, 1961, Ham made a publicity splash after NASA stipulated his short, suborbital trip, which NASA required before the United States could put its first person in space. Air Force’s chimp training facility in New Mexico, overshadows him. He flew on NASA’s Mercury-Atlas 5 (MA-5) mission, which the relatively new space agency deemed necessary before orbiting an astronaut in a Mercury capsule. Sixty years ago, on November 29, 1961, Enos became the first chimpanzee to orbit the Earth. ![]()
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