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50 Years of Space Monkeys

This week marks the anniversary of some serious intrepid traveling: NASA successfully launched the first monkeys into space 50 years ago. Two rhesus monkeys named Miss Baker and Able were launched in a Jupiter AM-18 rocket, and National Geographic’s Breaking Orbit blog reports that “they reached to a height of 360 miles (579 kilometers) before plummeting back to Earth to land in the ocean.” Scientists found the heroic “monkeynauts” alive and well and they were immediately taken to Washington for a press conference.

National Geographic News has a fantastic “monkeynaut” slide show documenting their role in the development of space travel, and reports that “although humans have been making space voyages since 1961, animals have continued to play a role in international space tests. In addition to monkeys, animals that have gone into space in the name of science include dogs, cats, fruit flies, rabbits, turtles, spiders, jellyfish, and amoebas.” And now, with the help of Richard Branson, all of us may be able to follow in their path .

My question is, what did the monkeys think of all this? This particular guy looks pretty confused by the whole thing. Got a caption for the photo? Let us know in the comments below.

Photo: Courtesy of NASA

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After 50 Years, Space Monkeys Not Forgotten

Nell Greenfieldboyce

Miss Baker, a squirrel monkey, is tucked inside her capsule and ready to launch into space aboard a Jupiter missile. She traveled into space on May 28, 1959, along with Able, an American-born rhesus monkey. NASA hide caption

Miss Baker, a squirrel monkey, is tucked inside her capsule and ready to launch into space aboard a Jupiter missile. She traveled into space on May 28, 1959, along with Able, an American-born rhesus monkey.

Able is extricated from the nose cone after it was recovered from the ocean. NASA hide caption

Able is extricated from the nose cone after it was recovered from the ocean.

In Huntsville, Ala., there is an unusual grave site where, instead of flowers, people sometimes leave bananas.

The gravestone reads: "Miss Baker, squirrel monkey, first U.S. animal to fly in space and return alive. May 28, 1959."

Fifty years ago, when Baker made her famous flight, she had some company in the nose cone of the Jupiter ballistic missile: a rhesus monkey named Able.

Able and Baker were shot about 360 miles up into space and experienced about nine minutes of weightlessness. Their safe return occurred two years before any humans flew into space, and it made them huge celebrities.

The monkeys appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and at a press conference, news correspondents "pushed each other and clambered over chairs to get closer," reported The New York Times .

Meanwhile, the newspaper noted, "the monkeys were far less excited than the humans. They munched peanuts and crackers."

Early Space Travelers

Able and Baker were not the first living creatures to return to Earth alive from space, although that myth seems to be out there, says Chris Dubbs, co-author of the book Animals in Space: From Research Rockets to the Space Shuttle.

In 1947, the United States sent up fruit flies, which were the first living things to travel into space, Dubbs says. "And then they started sending monkeys."

America's first attempt to send up a monkey was in 1948. For over a decade, all monkey flights failed for one reason or another, Dubbs says.

In one case, the rocket exploded. Another monkey died on impact when its parachute failed. After another parachute failure, a monkey plummeted into the sea and was never recovered. One monkey mission saw the animals return home safely, but their vehicle hadn't traveled high enough for them to actually reach space.

Meanwhile, the Soviets were sending up dogs and having success bringing them back alive from suborbital flights, Dubbs says. At least 30 of those animals returned alive.

The first animal who actually orbited the planet was a dog named Laika, though she did not survive the entire flight. She was launched in 1957 in Sputnik 2.

"Americans were aware of this," Dubbs says, "and the space race was clearly on by the time that Able and Baker came on the scene."

Two Tiny Astronauts

Able was a rhesus monkey, and Baker was a much smaller squirrel monkey.

Because the rhesus monkey is revered by some in India, U.S. officials stressed that Able had been born not in India, but in Independence, Kan.

The monkeys' missile blasted off in the early morning hours from Cape Canaveral and traveled 1,700 miles in 16 minutes, reaching an altitude of about 360 miles.

The bright missile lit up the dark sky, says Joseph Guion, who commanded the Navy vessel USS Kiowa that retrieved the monkeys.

"You could read a newspaper on the bridge of the ship, it was so bright," he says. "The nose cone arced down, almost like a shooting star, down toward the water. It just came down very rapidly and — boom — it was gone."

He and his crew at first thought it had sunk. But then a lookout spotted the nose cone bobbing in the water, and they struggled to get it on board.

Military personnel on the ship checked on the monkeys and then sent out a message: "Able Baker perfect. No injuries or other difficulties."

Guion says he was floored to see how tiny Baker's capsule was.

"It was about the size of a large thermos bottle," he says, recalling that Baker was "extremely easy to talk to and hold. She was like a little doll. Able was just the opposite. You could not get near her."

The two monkeys were taken to the officer's wardroom, where air conditioning had been installed for their comfort. Later, they were flown to Washington, D.C., under military escort, for the press conference.

A Hundred Letters A Day

Unfortunately, Able died just a few days later, during a medical procedure to remove an electrode. Her stuffed body is on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

But Baker lived another 25 years, mostly at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala.

"She would get 100 to 150 letters a day from schoolchildren," says Ed Buckbee, a former director of the center. Children read about her in textbooks and wanted to say hello. "She was very prominent in the story of our early spaceflight ventures."

The pioneering monkeys weren't forgotten, even after the first humans reached space in 1961.

More than 300 people attended Baker's funeral service when she died of kidney failure in 1984, Buckbee says.

And, he says, often at her grave at the entrance to the rocket center, "you'll see a banana or two laying there. You know, some youngster brought it or somebody heard the story and wanted to leave something in memory, kind of like leaving flowers over a person's grave."

Watch monkeys Able and Baker get prepped for takeoff and launched into space.

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January 29, 2013

Monkeys in Space: A Brief Spaceflight History

A look at simian astronauts over the years

By Mike Wall & SPACE.com

If Iran has indeed launched a monkey to space, the nation is following a path similar to that taken by the United States in the early days of its space program.

Iran announced today (Jan. 28) that it had successfully launched a live monkey on a spaceflight and recovered the animal alive after landing. The move is a prelude to sending humans into space, which the Islamic Republic hopes to do by 2020, Iranian Space Agency officials said.

Iran and the United States don't see eye-to-eye on many issues, but both have viewed monkeys as good astronaut test subjects over the years. The U.S. was the first country ever to launch a primate, sending a rhesus monkey named Albert to a sub-space altitude of 39 miles (63 kilometers) aboard a V2 rocket in June 1948.

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Very little was known about the physiological effects of spaceflight back in those days, with some scientists postulating that astronauts' cardiovascular systems would fail in the microgravity environment, causing near-instant death. So researchers wanted to blast some relatively large animals into space to see how they fared. [ Photos: Pioneering Animals in Space ]

Albert died of suffocation during his flight, and a number of his simian brethren also sacrificed their lives to the cause in the ensuing years.

Another rhesus monkey named Albert II, for example, became the first primate to reach space, achieving an altitude of 83 miles (134 km) aboard another V2 in June 1949. He survived the launch but died after a parachute failure caused his capsule to slam hard into the ground.

Alberts III and IV died during their missions in late 1949, and Albert V was victimized by another parachute failure in 1951. Albert VI, also known as Yorick, survived his 1951 flight, though it topped out at an altitude of just 45 miles (72 km) — significantly below the generally accepted 62-mile (100 km) boundary demarcating outer space.

Yorick died several hours after landing, possibly from heat stress suffered as he sat inside his cramped capsule in the New Mexico sun, waiting for the recovery crew.

The United States recorded a milestone in May 1959, finally recovering two primates alive after a spaceflight. A rhesus monkey named Able and a squirrel monkey named Baker reached an altitude of 300 miles (483 km) aboard a Jupiter rocket and were retrieved unharmed. (Sadly, Able died several days later during an operation to remove an electrode from under her skin.)

As the American human spaceflight program began to build momentum, the nation started experimenting with chimpanzees, which are larger and more closely related to humans than are rhesus, squirrel or other monkeys.

The U.S. launched a chimp named Ham on a suborbital spaceflight on Jan. 31, 1961. Ham reached an altitude of 157 miles (253 km) during a 16.5-minute flight and was recovered unharmed, though a bit dehydrated. With this success in hand, Alan Shepard successfully blasted off on his suborbital flight on May 5, 1961, becoming the first American — and second human, after the Soviet Union's Yuri Gagarin — ever to reach space.

A chimp named Enos orbited the Earth on Nov. 29, 1961, paving the way for John Glenn's historic orbital flight of Feb. 20, 1962. (Again, the U.S. was slightly late to the party: Gagarin orbited our planet on his flight of April 12, 1961.)

After it became established that humans could indeed survive the rigors of spaceflight, monkeys and apes faded into the background. The U.S. continued to launch animals for scientific experiments but increasingly concentrated on smaller creatures such as mice and insects, which are easier to care for and take up much less space (although two squirrel monkeys did ride on the space shuttle Challenger 's STS-51-B mission in April-May 1985.)

The United States' space race rival, the Soviet Union, primarily used dogs in the run-up to its first human launches, thinking that canines would prove to be less fidgety in flight than monkeys.

The Soviets launched their first dogs to space in 1951. The nation famously succeeded in lofting the first animal — a dog called Laika ("Barker") — to orbit aboard the Sputnik 2 spacecraft in November 1957. (Laika died during the flight.)

Despite its canine focus, the Soviet Union and its successor state Russia did launch a number of rhesus monkeys to space in the 1980s and 1990s, as part of a program called Bion. France also blasted two pig-tailed macaque monkeys to suborbital space in 1967.

Iran's recent launch was not its first attempt to send a monkey into space. A previous orbital effort in 2011 failed.

Iran Claims to Have Sent Monkey Into Space

Iran in Space: Rockets, Satellites & Monkeys (Photos)

Most Extreme Human Spaceflight Records

Copyright 2013 SPACE.com , a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

How animal astronauts paved the way for human space flight

Professor of Wildlife Conservation, University of Salford

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Robert John Young does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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The other day my kids came home from school all excited to tell me they had been watching Tim Peake, the astronaut set to make Britain’s first spacewalk . I was surprised how much excitement this had caused in my kids, but then one of my earliest memories is sitting with my father watching Neil Armstrong step on the moon; I can still recall it vividly.

The history of aeronautical and space exploration is one full not only of human heroes such as Yuri Gagarin but also of animal explorers, albeit passive ones. It was the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, worried about the effects of high altitude on human health, who hung a basket containing a live sheep, cockerel and duck below one of their earliest balloons.

This also turns out to be an early example of a controlled experiment: the sheep was there to represent human physiological responses, the duck as a control because they are accustomed to high altitudes and the cockerel as a second control since it is a bird not accustomed to high altitudes. All three survived their brief flight, in front of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and subsequently man took to the air.

Like the Montgolfier brothers, early space scientists were concerned about whether humans would be able to survive travel in space. So in 1947, a few fruit flies were the first animals in space, launched on top of an American V2 rocket and safely returned to earth, unlike many of the animals that followed them in the next decades.

During the late 1940s and 1950s a series of American rhesus monkeys all called Albert made trips with varying degrees of success into space. They showed humans could survive the rigour of space travel, or at least straight-up, straight-down missions.

The Russians’ chosen species to be their animal astronaut was the “stray dog”. Dogs were chosen for their physiological similarities to humans and strays were preferred as they already had experience of toughing it out on the freezing streets of Russia.

Laika , a mongrel from Moscow, became the first animal to go into orbit in 1957. She was sent into space with no way of returning her to Earth. It had been anticipated that Laika would have survived a week or so with the food and oxygen supplied to her, but Sputnik 2 overheated and she died after only a few hours.

Yet it was the missions with Laika and many other dogs that finally led to the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human being in space in 1961. Despite the success of the first human, many more animals would be flown into space, especially dogs (more than 50 missions) and primates (more than 30 missions).

One of the most famous primate missions was undertaken by a young male chimpanzee called Ham in 1961. Ham had received mission training using positive reinforcement (banana pellets) and punishment (mild electric shock to his feet) to get him to pull levers during his mission – showing that astronauts did not have to be mere passengers.

The use of animal astronauts therefore laid the foundations for human space flight. As scientists wished to answer questions such as how microgravity will affect the flight of a butterfly , the formation of a spider’s web or a gecko’s reproduction , a veritable zoo of animals have gone beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.

Some of the experiments Peake is conducting during his time in space concern astrobiology, which sounds very cool to a mere Earth-bound biologist. He’s using the European Space Agency’s module called EXPOSE, which houses a variety of organisms such as bacteria and fungi which are exposed to the harsh conditions of space to see if they can survive.

The challenges of life in space are considerable – from huge temperature fluctuations, radiation and life in a vacuum – so the organisms chosen are known on Earth as extremophiles, species normally found in extreme conditions such as close to underwater volcanic vents (that is, high temperatures and extreme chemical conditions).

So far microorganisms known as “water bears” or tardigrades and some bacteria have been shown to survive the extreme conditions of space . Data from experiments on the International Space Station will enlighten us about the possibility of life on other planets and provide information useful for human lead trips to Mars and beyond.

My kids are rightly excited by the work of human astronauts but we should not forget the contribution that animals have made. And in 2008 Russia built a monument to Laika hailing her contribution to human space exploration.

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The first successful American "astronaut" is on display at the Smithsonian in the Apollo to the Moon exhibition. It’s not Alan Shepard, but Able, a rhesus monkey.

Able and a squirrel monkey named Baker were the first American animals to enter space and return safely. On May 28, 1959 at Cape Canaveral, Able was placed in the nose cone of Jupiter AM-18 secured by a contour cradle made of fiberglass with sponge rubber lining specifically built for her body. Included in the cradle were multiple electrodes used to collect information on Able’s reaction to noise, acceleration, deceleration, vibration, rotation, and weightlessness. The cradle was then placed in a capsule with a life support system that included oxygen, moisture and CO2 absorbers, and electrical heating and cooling systems to keep the monkey alive. Baker was placed her in own separate capsule in the nose cone.

Able and Baker’s mission lasted for approximately 16 minutes, nine of which they experienced weightlessness. The two monkeys traveled to an altitude of over 300 miles and 1,700 ground miles south of the launching point. After recovery by the naval ship USS Kiowa, the primate space travelers were reported as unhurt and in good spirits.

After recovery, the two monkeys were flown to Washington, DC for a press conference, where they were treated like celebrities. They even appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine on June 15, 1959. Able was awarded a medal and Certificate of Merit from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Able was not the first choice for this mission. Another rhesus monkey had been extensively trained for the flight, but was replaced with Able only two weeks before the launch. The first candidate was born in India, and President Eisenhower determined that this might offend the Indian people who view rhesus monkeys as sacred animals. Therefore, American-born Able from Independence, Kansas was the new choice.

Unfortunately, Able died on the operating table at Armored Medical Research Laboratory (AMRL) in Fort Knox  just four days after her space flight. She was having an Electroencephalography (EED) electrode removed, a routine procedure. An EED measures electrical activity of the brain. The incision site was a shallow half inch, but anesthesia was used to save Able from discomfort. While under the anesthesia, her heart abruptly stopped. Extensive measures were taken to save her, to no avail. On March 22, 1960, Able’s body was transferred to the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of Natural History preserved her.

Able’s space partner Baker, or Miss Baker as she has been known since her flight, lived out her days first at the Naval Aerospace Medical Center in Pensacola, Florida and then at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. On November 29, 1984, Miss Baker died of kidney failure at Auburn University, making her the oldest living squirrel monkey in captivity. Miss Baker’s grave can be seen at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center frequently with a banana or two on top.

Thanks to Able and Miss Baker, NASA and the U.S. military were assured that humans could survive in space. These two monkeys paved the way to human exploration in space.

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AT THE SMITHSONIAN

Space monkey able celebrates flight’s 50th anniversary.

Joseph Caputo

On May 28, 1959, a rhesus monkey named Able, plucked from a zoo in Independence, Kansas, and a squirrel monkey named Baker, made history as the first mammals to survive space flight.

Strapped into specially-designed couches inside a Jupiter missile nose cone, Able and Baker flew 300 miles above the surface of the earth reaching speeds more than 10,000 miles per hour.

Animals had been sent into space before. In 1957, two years before the monkeys' flight, the Soviets watched Laika, the space dog, orbit around the Earth. She did not survive.

But Able and Baker did, and their survival was evidence that mammals, even humans, could safely travel through space. Two years later, in 1961, Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet, became the first person in space, making a 108-minute orbital flight in his Vostok 1 spacecraft.

Unfortunately, a few days after the historic flight, Able did not survive surgery to remove an infected electrode from under her skin. Her body was preserved and is now on view at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum.

Able recently found new life as a star in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian . She and partner-in-mischief Dexter, a capuchin monkey from the first Night at the Museum movie, can be seen testing security guard Larry Daley's patience with some slapstick comedy.

Get the latest on what's happening At the Smithsonian in your inbox.

Joseph Caputo | | READ MORE

Joseph Caputo is a former editorial intern for Smithsonian and now a freelance science writer and editor based in Boston, Massachusetts.

• Jan 31, 2021

Planet of the Apes: US Missions that Sent Primates Into Space

Updated: Jul 18, 2023

The use of animals in aeronautical exploration dates back to 1783 when the Montgolfier brothers sent a sheep, a duck, and a rooster on a hot air balloon flight. The United States in particular used high-altitude balloon flights to test radiation exposure and physiological responses of rodents, cats, dogs, frogs, and most notably, monkeys.

Ham the chimp posing with a newspaper covering his flight in 1961 (NASA)

The US launched a number of primate flights using rockets from 1948 to 1961, along with one flight in 1969 and one in 1985. France, the USSR, and Russia also launched monkeys into space in later years. American monkeys included rhesus macaque, crab-eating macaque, squirrel monkeys, pig-tailed macaques, and chimpanzees. No monkey flew more than once and most were under anesthesia during launch. Unfortunately, the death rate was very high— most died soon after landing.

The first of these primates was Albert, a rhesus macaque who launched aboard a V2 rocket on June 11, 1948. He did not make it to space and died of suffocation during the flight. He was followed by Albert II, another rhesus who became the first monkey and primate in space on June 14, 1949, traveling 21 miles (34 km) above the Kármán line. He died on impact as a result of a parachute failure. Albert III, a crab-eating macaque, launched on September 16 but died when his V2 rocket exploded at 35,000 feet (10.7 km). Albert IV was the last monkey launched on a V2 and like Albert II died on impact on December 8. Starting in 1951, Aerobee rockets were used in place of V2's. On April 18, Albert V was launched and killed due to parachute failure. Albert VI, also called Yorick [1] , launched on September 20 along with eleven mice. Though he did not quite reach space [2] , he was the first monkey to survive landing (the Soviet dogs Dezik and Tsygan were the first living creatures to survive a trip to space in July). He perished two hours later due to stress and overheating in the sealed capsule sitting in the hot New Mexico desert. Patricia and Mike were two Philippine monkeys who flew on May 21, 1952 and survived the flight. They too did not reach space.

On December 13, 1958, the Army launched a squirrel monkey named Gordo (also known as Old Reliable) aboard a Jupiter rocket. Though he survived most of the trip, the nose cone's recovery parachute failed to deploy as it fell back to Earth, slamming into the Atlantic Ocean and sinking to the floor 1,302 nautical miles (2,411 km) downrange from Cape Canaveral. It was never recovered. However, his respiration and heartbeat proved humans could survive a similar trip.

On May 28, 1959, a rhesus macaque named Miss Able and a squirrel monkey named Miss Baker launched aboard another Jupiter. Able was from Independence, Kansas, while Baker was from Peru. Their names were taken from the 1943-1955 US military phonetic alphabet. Able died on June 1 while undergoing surgery to remove an infected electrode. She is preserved and on display at the National Air and Space Museum. Miss Baker became the first monkey to survive the physical stresses of space (and the following medical procedures) and spent the rest of her days first at the Naval Aerospace Medical Center in Pensacola, Florida, and then at the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama where she entertained guests and received more than a hundred fan letters a day. She died on November 29, 1984 at the age of 27, attaining the record for oldest living squirrel monkey, and is buried on museum grounds. You can buy a stuffed toy of Miss Baker from the Air Force Space & Missile Museum here .

Miss Baker posing with a model Jupiter rocket (NASA)

A rhesus macaque named Sam launched on the Little Joe 2 flight of the Mercury Program from Wallops Island, Virginia, on December 4. On January 21, 1960, Miss Sam, another rhesus, flew on Little Joe 1B. Though this flight only reached an altitude of 8 miles (13 km), it tested the Mercury spacecraft's launch escape tower. The name Sam is an acronym for School of Aerospace Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

Perhaps the most famous of all the space-bound primates is a chimpanzee named Ham. Ham stands for Holloman Aerospace Medicine, which is located at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. He flew on Mercury-Redstone 2 on January 31, 1961 and was trained to pull levers to receive rewards of banana pellets and avoid electric shocks. His flight demonstrated the ability to perform basic tasks during spaceflight and was a crucial step in preparing man to enter space. It also tested new systems such as environmental control, live retrorockets, and voice communication. Ham was one of six chimps trained for the mission (two males and four females) and his backup was a female named Minnie. Though a number of problems arose during his flight, the mission was successful and Ham performed his tasks well. By the time Navy helicopters arrived at the spacecraft, which had splashed down further downrange than anticipated, it was on its side and slowly becoming submerged in the water. Fortunately both Ham and his spacecraft, Mercury spacecraft #5 , were recovered. However, the malfunctions occurring in both the rocket and capsule determined the Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle was not ready for manned flight. This resulted in another booster development flight in March. If that flight had not taken place, Mercury-Redstone 3 would have launched three weeks before Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1, making Alan Shepard the first human in space. Ham lived at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. for seventeen years before being transferred to a zoo in North Carolina where he lived with other chimpanzees. He died on January 19, 1983 and is buried at the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, New Mexico. His spacecraft is now on display at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, California.

Ham in his specialized fitted couch similar to those the Mercury Astronauts would use (NASA)

A squirrel monkey named Goliath perished when his Atlas rocket exploded thirty-five seconds after launch from Cape Canaveral on November 10, 1961. A rhesus macaque called Scatback flew a sub-orbital Atlas flight on December 20 but was lost at sea after splashing down.

Enos was another chimpanzee who flew on Mercury-Atlas 5 on November 29. The name Enos means "man" in Hebrew. He flew two orbits around the Earth and became the first chimp (and primate) to circle the globe. Enos was originally supposed to orbit three times but a malfunctioning thruster caused the flight to be terminated after two. Like Ham, he performed his portion of the mission well. He was the sixth animal to orbit the Earth, following the Soviet dogs Laika (Sputnik 2 in 1957), Belka and Strelka (Korabl-Sputnik 2 in 1960), Chernushka (Korabl-Sputnik 4 in 1961), and Zvezdochka (Korabl-Sputnik 5 in 1961). MA-5 was the final step in preparing men for orbit. On February 20 the following year, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. Enos died of non-space related causes eleven months after his flight at Holloman Air Force Base. He was succeeded by four successful US manned orbital flights of the Mercury program.

After these few flights in late 1961, NASA focused solely on sending men into space and discontinued future primate missions. It was not until summer of 1969 another monkey flew in space on an American rocket. Bonny, a pig-tailed macaque, flew on Biosatellite 3 from June 29 to July 8. Like Ham and Enos, he was also trained to operate a food dispenser. It was the first multi-day monkey flight and was supposed to last thirty days. However, Bonny's health deteriorated rapidly during the first week and he returned to Earth on July 7. He died the next day after recovery. The final American primate flight took place in 1985 during STS-51-B, the Space Shuttle mission that carried Spacelab 3. It consisted of two squirrel monkeys named No. 3165 and No. 384-80.

Space monkeys have been in the eye of the public since their first successful flights. An episode of the American science-fiction television series Quantum Leap entitled "The Wrong Stuff" focuses on NASA's testing and experimenting on chimpanzees. It aired in 1991 and takes place a week before Mercury-Redstone 2. The animated comedy Space Chimps was released in 2008.

Similar to the canine flights undertaken by the Soviet Union during the early days of space exploration, American monkey flights gave the nation the experience needed to send men into space. Without these animals' sacrifices, the space program could have suffered greater losses of life and have faced termination. Their contributions to science and technology could not have been made by anyone or anything else and just as they are mankind's ancestors, they paved the way for man's small steps and giant leaps into the final frontier.

"Then, at 900,000 feet, you'll get the feeling that you must have a banana."

(Daily Mail, February 23, 1961)

Author's note: This was one of the most entertaining posts to write— thanks for reading and please like and share!

[1] I was unable to find any information as to why Albert VI was also called Yorick. Yorick was the name of the deceased court jester in William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

[2] At the time, the US declared space at an altitude of 50 miles, which is below the internationally recognized 62 miles.

Bibliography

Betz, Eric. “A Brief History of Chimps in Space.” Discover Magazine , Discover Magazine, 21 Apr. 2020, www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/a-brief-history-of-chimps-in-space.

Gray, Tara. “Animals in Space.” NASA , NASA, 1998, history.nasa.gov/animals.html.

Wall, Mike. “Monkeys in Space: A Brief Spaceflight History.” Space.com , Space, 28 Jan. 2013, www.space.com/19505-space-monkeys-chimps-history.html.

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Two Female Monkeys Went to Space 60 Years Ago. One Became the Poster Child for Astronaut Masculinity

Making history was just the beginning of their story.

Sixty years ago today, a pair of female monkeys made history when they went to space and landed safely — but their story was only just beginning to get weird.

Able and Baker took flight on May 28, 1959, soaring 300 miles (480 kilometers) up during a 15-minute flight. At the time, they were humble female laboratory animals, barely given names for the project before they were stuffed into a Jupiter Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile . By the time the first American human followed them, just two years later, Able was dead, the picture of machismo and sacrifice, while Baker was living in retirement, married off and put on display.

"My whole jam with the history of the astronauts is kind of going one step back in time and going beyond the earliest stories that we know about them," Jordan Bimm, a sociologist at Princeton University who has researched Able and Baker in this context, told Space.com. "Almost nobody remembers the story of Able and Baker, who were actually the first primates to be recovered from a spaceflight."

Related: Able and Baker: The First Primates to Survive Spaceflight in Photos

Before Able, a rhesus monkey, and Baker, a smaller squirrel monkey, faded into obscurity, they were American stars, pawns in a story that became a morass of Cold War stereotypes and symbolism, Bimm argues. "[Their survival] allowed them to perform a sort of PR work and to become, importantly, America's first celebrity space animals," he said.

The mismatched monkeys flew as part of NASA's Bioflight #2 mission, along with payloads ranging from blood samples to yeast cells to two frogs. Their predecessors had met horrifying fates: six consecutive monkeys dubbed Albert and one named Gordo were killed by a variety of spaceflight and recovery hazards. But Able and Baker survived their predawn flight and were fished out of the Caribbean safely, and with two live monkeys in hand, the government's spin machine whipped into overdrive.

"Recovering these animals alive was a huge priority; they really, really, really wanted them both alive," Bimm said. "Getting some wins on the board for America was crucial." Able and Baker were shipped off to Washington, D.C., to be paraded in front of journalists — in the very same room where, just one month earlier, Alan Shepard, John Glenn and their fellow human trainees had been introduced to the world a few weeks earlier.

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"From the very, very beginning of human spaceflight, humans selected as astronauts had to contend with animals also going to space," Bimm said. "The only difference is that the monkeys had actually been to space, had actually done the job that the humans were selected to do." It's enough to give even the most swaggering of astronauts an inferiority complex.

But celebrity isn't easy, and that news conference included the first hint of just how weird the story of Able and Baker would get. Gen. Joseph McNinch, who headed the Army's medical research unit, misspoke, using "he" to answer a question about Able. A journalist corrected him and all seemed to be well — but the slip of the tongue began to gain traction. A cartoon Bimm found that was published four days after the flight depicted Able in astronaut garb returning to a harried midcentury monkey wife and baby, the very picture of a jetsetting businessman and absentee father.

Related: Photos: Pioneering Animals in Space

The same day that the cartoon was published, Able died. Caretakers noticed an electrode implanted in her skin seemed infected and prepared to remove it, but when doctors sprayed routine anesthetic in her cage in preparation for the surgery, she stopped breathing. The medical team spent 2 hours attempting to revive her — even performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation — but failed.

After her death, Able was eulogized in obituaries, several of which listed her as male. Her skin was stuffed and sent to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum , where she was displayed encased in spaceflight equipment like Han Solo frozen in carbonite. Bimm sees the pose as eternally at work, looking up toward the heavens, hand at her heart.

"Unlike other taxidermy exhibits, where the animal is placed in nature, in this one the animal, Able, is completely surrounded by technology," Bimm said. "It has the sort of valence of the fallen soldier."

Baker, who was often referred to as Miss Baker, survived the postflight hubbub but remained a public icon. For years, she was on display, first at "Baker's Bungalow" in Florida, then at the Alabama Space and Rocket Center, where her enclosure was labeled "The First Lady in Space."

During her retirement, handlers arranged three different "marriages," each heralded with breezy gossip updates. She was thrown birthday parties (despite having been born in the wild) and made to "pawtograph" glamor shots for fans. Baker lived to 27 years old, a record-breaking achievement in and of itself.

(Coincidentally, female pilots spent the first years of Baker's retirement lobbying the government to consider them for astronaut training, with 13 passing all the physical qualifying tests that the Mercury 7 took. Their de facto leader, Jerrie Cobb , endured much of the same media scrutiny and stereotyping as Baker did — and never quite reached space.)

Related: Pioneering Animals in Space: A Gallery

Ironically, before their flight, most of the hubbub around Able and Baker's identity was focused on where the monkeys were born — Baker in Peru and Able in Independence, Kansas. (Able's species is venerated in India and so the government insisted on an American monkey to avoid upsetting the geopolitically important country.)

But just days after their flight, that rubric was forgotten, erased by a new one. "There's sort of a male/female, masculine/feminine, work and domesticity binary in operation," Bimm said. The dead/alive binary he left unspoken, but for years it separated Able and Baker as well.

Until Baker, too, died and was buried below a massive marble headstone inscribed to "Miss Baker, squirrel monkey … First U.S. animal to fly in space and return alive." Bimm has visited both Able's display and Baker's memorial . "It was moving," Bimm said. "As a historian, you become really attached to your subjects and a lot of the times my subjects are quite evil people, they're ex-Nazi scientists who come to America and work for the space program, but in the case of Able and Baker, they're these innocent animals."

People still visit both monkeys — some leave bananas at Baker's grave. But by the time the pair had died, the space program had moved on, and so had space fans. The first space shuttle had launched in 1981, and soon enough the country had humans to mourn, not just monkeys, after the Challenger broke apart shortly after launch in 1986. "The shuttle era had its own tragedies, human tragedies," Bimm said. "Those really served to displace, I think, a lot of the narratives about space."

But Bimm argues that Able and Baker's wild story offers important reminders of the baggage that comes with spaceflight — gender stereotypes and sex discrimination, jingoism and missile programs, ex-Nazis and animal cruelty among them. All of those undercurrents continue to haunt the U.S. space program.

"I hope people see it as a story, as something constructed in the minds of humans, and I hope they see for all animals in spaceflight research that these are unwilling participants," Bimm said. That's especially true because spaceflight research on animals continues to this day and has already been discussed in the context of future Mars exploration . "We need to talk about them realistically and not create these fables and fantasies that paper over the truth."

• Cosmic Menagerie: A History of Animals in Space (Infographic)
• Monkeys in Space: A Brief Spaceflight History
• How Space Exploration Can Teach Us to Preserve All Life on Earth

Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her @meghanbartels . Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook .

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Meghan is a senior writer at Space.com and has more than five years' experience as a science journalist based in New York City. She joined Space.com in July 2018, with previous writing published in outlets including Newsweek and Audubon. Meghan earned an MA in science journalism from New York University and a BA in classics from Georgetown University, and in her free time she enjoys reading and visiting museums. Follow her on Twitter at @meghanbartels.

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What was the first animal sent into space?

Miss Baker was one of the squirrel monkeys sent into space

Since the very beginning of space exploration, animals have been used in space programmes. Find out what pioneering animals travelled in space, and which was the first to orbit the Earth.

What was the first animal in space? 

What was the first animal to orbit the earth.

Animals that went to space

To date, a total of 32 monkeys have flown in space. These species include rhesus macaques, squirrel monkeys and pig-tailed monkeys. Chimpanzees have also flown.

On 4 June 1949, Albert II became the first monkey in space, but he died on reentry when the parachute to his capsule failed. Two other monkeys, Albert III and IV also died when their rockets failed.

A mouse was launched into space on 15 August 1950 but did not survive the return journey. 

In the 1950s, the US and the Soviet Union launched a total of 12 dogs on various suborbital flights, Laika being the first.

On 31 January 1961, the first hominid was launched into space. A chimpanzee named Ham was part of the US-led Mercury space programme. A main part of the mission was to test whether tasks could be performed in space, the results of which were instrumental when launching the first American in space, Alan Shepard, on 5 May 1961. 

First animals to orbit the moon

First animals in space facts

• The first dogs to return from space alive were Belka and Strelka (‘Squirrel’ and ‘Little Arrow’) launched on 19 August 1960 by the Soviet space programme. Strelka gave birth to six puppies, one of which was given to US President John F Kennedy by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
• The first fish in space were South American guppies. They spent 48 days in orbit on the Russian Salyut 5 spacecraft in 1976.
• In 1973, a common-cross spider named Arabella became the first to spin a web in space, thus providing an answer to the question of whether webs can be spun in zero gravity.
• An American monkey named Albert II went into space on a V2 in 1949 and a mouse in 1950. In the 1960s, guinea pigs, frogs, cats, wasps, beetles and a chimpanzee followed.
• In 2007, Russian scientists celebrated after a cockroach named Hope became the first creature to conceive in space - giving birth to 33 cockroaches aboard a Foton-M satellite. 

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Who were the Space Monkeys?

The Space Age was an era of unprecedented technological development. In addition to developing the rockets and modules needed to put astronauts into space, considerable resources were also dedicated towards testing the effects spaceflight would have on the human body. In order to do this, test subjects needed to be selected that were physiologically similar enough to human beings.

For NASA, the Russians, and many space programs that have followed, the choice was to send simians (aka. monkeys) into space. While space missions would rely other animals to test the effects spaceflight would have on living organisms (such as dogs, guinea pigs, and even insects), monkeys were the most-widely used since they are more closely related to humans.

Background:

In the late 1940s, both NASA and the Soviet Space Program were working diligently to try and develop space launch capability. However, a going concern at the time was the risks posed by crewed spaceflight. At the time, the effects of weightlessness on the human body were unknown, and whether or not a human could even survive exposure was the subject of much scientific debate.

American Space Monkeys:

Russian space monkeys:, other space agencies:.

Although men have gone to space, they were not the first ones there. Scientists have sent a number of different animals up into space including monkeys. Both Russia and America sent monkeys into space. This is because scientists wanted to determine what the biological effects of space travel were before they sent humans up. While Russia only used rhesus monkeys, the US used many different species including rhesus monkeys, squirrel monkeys, cynomolgus monkeys, pig-tailed macaques, and chimpanzees. Even France sent up two monkeys into space during the 1960’s. These animals were both recovered alive.

Many of the monkeys sent up into space died either on impact or in space. The US sent four monkeys into space named Albert, all of which died. The first monkey that actually passed the Karman line and made it into space was Albert II. He was sent up in 1949 and died on impact.

Gordo, who was also known as Old Reliable, was sent into space in 1958. A squirrel monkey, he was chosen because of the similarity of the species to the human body. Gordo was lost on impact and neither him nor the shuttle was recovered; however, scientists were heartened by the mission because they believed it helped prove that humans could survive in space. The first monkeys to survive space were Able and Miss Baker who were sent up in 1959.

The Russians sent dogs up into space in addition to monkeys, which is why they did not send nearly as many monkeys into space as America did. Thus the first monkey that they actually sent into space was not until 1983. The monkeys that the Russians sent into space were named according to the letters of the alphabet. One of these monkeys – Dryoma – who went to space in 1987 – was later given to Fidel Castro. The last monkeys the Russians sent up into space were Lapik and Multik whe went up in 1997. Both of them survived the mission, but Multik had a heart attack a day after the flight during medical tests.

One of the most famous monkeys ever sent into space was Ham the Chimp. He was trained to operate the controls of the spaceship becoming the first animal to not just be a passenger. Ham was recovered safe after his capsule crashed in the Atlantic Ocean. Scientists were able to determine that astronauts would then be able to operate instruments in space and Alan Shepard went into space several months after Ham.

We have written many interesting articles about space monkeys and animals sent into space here at Universe Today. Here’s Russia to send monkey to Mars , Who was the First Monkey to go into Space? , 50th Anniversary of Historic Space Monkey Flight , What Animals have been to Space? , Who was the First Animal to go into Space? , Who was the First Dog to go into Space?

For more information, check out animals in space and monkeys in space fifty years later .

Astronomy Cast has an episode on spacesuits .

• NASA – Animals in Space
• Wikipedia – Monkeys and apes in space

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Human space travel owes everything to one forgotten creature

The Aerobee-19 rocket launch proved it was possible to send animals to space and bring them back alive.

Billionaires Richard Branson , Jeff Bezos , and now Jared Isaacman have all traveled to space in 2021. But the three, especially Bezos and Branson, aren’t exactly blazing new territory. After all, Mercury astronaut Alan Shephard made a similar, if somewhat higher, suborbital trip back in 1961. Today, there is a constant human presence in space at the International Space Station .

But even Shephard had his predecessors. On September 20, 1951, almost a decade before Shephard went to space and 70 years before the billionaire crowd made it, a Rhesus monkey named Yorick changed space history.

On that day, Yorick was strapped into the nose cone of United States Air Force’s Aerobee-19 rocket and became the first human-like animal to be successfully launched into space and safely landed... in a way.

“Technically, that monkey survived but died very soon after recovery,” Space historian and National Air and Space Museum Guggenheim fellow Jordan Bimm tells Inverse .

“They weren’t able to reach the rocket in time, and the specimen overheated and died of heat prostration.”

It was a sad and gruesome end for Yorick that, if it went differently, might have made Aerobee-19 a more significant part of the story of early spaceflight. Even at the time, Bimm says, the launch made few waves. But when America turned its attention to the space race with the Soviet Union following the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the Aerobee data would give the newly created NASA the boost they needed to put people into space.

“...a human-like creature could survive a rocket flight.”

Monkeys, Nazi rockets, and Project Blossom — In the wake of WWII, the U.S. Air Force did research with captured Nazi V2 rockets and American-made Aerobee rockets to answer a burning question:

Could a human survive the stresses of a rocket flight and perform meaningful work in space?

To rephrase the question more accurately, Bimm says: “Could a soldier perform a military function during a rocket flight?”

A replica of a German V2 rocket on the island of Usedom in the Baltic sea.

In 1947, the military and the National Institutes of Health partnered to put a collection of fruit flies in the nose cone of a V2 rocket that reached space altitude from its launch site at White Sands, New Mexico. These bugs are the first living things known to have left the planet and made it to space. But the research quickly expanded into a program dubbed Project Blossom, which used creatures considered closer physiological analogs to humans than fruit flies — monkeys being the gold standard.

“Contrast that to the Russian program, which was using dogs,” Bimm says. Their thinking on the Soviet side was that dogs were hardy, and they were survivors. They didn’t want a specimen to die and not survive.”

Survival did indeed turn out to be a bit of a problem for Project Blossom’s space monkeys.

“Sadly, these resulted in just a string of failures leading to the deaths of these monkeys,” Bimm says. “Some of them did reach space altitudes only to die on impact when the parachutes failed.”

Soviet cosmonaut dogs Belka and Strelka flew to space in 1960 aboard Sputnik 5.

When the Nazi rockets ran out, Project Blossom switched to using the less powerful Aerobee rocket, which had a difficult time breaching the Karman line. This internationally recognized edge of space lies at about 62 miles altitude. But Richard Branson, who only flew to 53 miles high, claims he went to space. And so did the scientists sending Yorick up there, too.

Yorick and Aerobee-19 would make it to 44.7 miles altitude.

“If it were Richard Branson, he definitely would say that he was in space,” Bimm says.

“From a medical perspective, if you are above a point in which the problem with keeping you alive is going to be the same in the upper atmosphere as it is in space, it’s essentially space.”

Aerobee-19 was the mission that broke with the past in that the parachute didn’t break. Yorick, and the eleven mice accompanying him on the mission, landed safely in the New Mexican desert. The rodents survived the heat, though Bimm notes they were probably euthanized for further study.

“The public didn’t care .”

“I think the most important thing from this flight was the knowledge that a human-like creature could survive a rocket flight,” Bimm says.

“There was no limit in the actual forces of launch, of zero-G, weightlessness, or the parachute reentry and landing that was going to kill a human.”

Alas, poor Yorick — Aerobee-19 occasioned no jumping and cheering in mission control like when NASA lands a flagship mission today. It just wasn’t seen as a big deal.

“There wasn’t a lot of media coverage. The public didn’t care about it,” Bimm says. “What you do see is a bit of a lull in animal flights. I think there’s like one or two more after this one, but then they drop off for quite a long time.”

When Sputnik launched on October 4, 1957, American interest in spaceflight and sending living creatures up took off. On May 28, 1959, America launched two monkeys named Able and Baker to space aboard a Jupiter rocket. Unlike Yorick, they were recovered alive, and they took the glory.

The NASA space monkey Baker atop a model of a Jupiter rocket in 1959.

“They were able to become the sort of the first celebrity space animals in America,” Bimm says.

Because Able and Baker survived, “they were able to put them on a desk at NASA Headquarters behind the American flag and show them to the public.”

Alas, for poor Yorick, it’s hard to make a big PR push with a dead monkey.

Aerobee’s space medicine legacy— But to say Aerobee-19 was a waste or that Yorick doesn’t deserve a spot in the annals of space heroes .

“It’s not like a watershed triumph or a major landmark flight,” Bimm says, “But it is important because it is sort of the first time that a complex living creature was successfully recovered from an American rocket flight in living condition — at least very, very briefly.”

And the data collected by Aerobee-19 and Project Blossom were essential to the foundations of space medicine as a field. Before Aerobee-19, the idea that anything like a human could survive a rocket flight was purely theoretical, and Yorick showed what to do — and not do — to keep something that looks and acts enough like a human alive through all stages of rocket flight.

“You can’t draw a line directly from that to Project Mercury because the interest does subside for a little bit,” Bimm says.

“But when the emergency of Sputnik happened, they’re not starting from scratch. They can go back to the slides. They can go back to that ten years of preparation by the US Air Force in the Department of Space Medicine.”

This article was originally published on Sep. 20, 2021

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The second monkey in space looked profoundly uncomfortable

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If you know your space animals, then you're probably already familiar with Ham , the first chimp America ever launched into space. You also probably know Laika , the late, great Russian space dog and the first animal to orbit Earth.

But a pair of monkeys — a squirrel monkey named Miss Baker and a rhesus monkey named Miss Able — deserves just as much appreciation. They took great risks to advance our knowledge of space, even when it was incredibly uncomfortable.

Those two monkeys were the first American animals, and some of the first animals in general, ever to travel into space and make it back alive (they lost only to a couple of Russian dogs). And it involved an extremely awkward trip. Miss Baker was strapped to the top of a missile and sent into suborbital flight, and lived to enjoy a long life back on Earth.

Miss Baker wasn't just any monkey. She was a monkey with the right stuff.

Miss Baker perches on a model of the ship she flew on. ( NASA )

Miss Baker's story is told in Animals in Space: From Research Rockets to the Space Shuttle . She was born in 1958 in a Peruvian jungle, where she was captured and brought to the United States.

Found in a Miami pet shop, Miss Baker competed against other monkey candidates who were winnowed, like real astronauts, to see which had the "right stuff" to go into space. The monkeys were tested for intelligence, tolerance of small capsules and electrodes, and general affability. Miss Baker passed, and not just because she was brave — the team working with her nicknamed her "TLC" because she was so affectionate.

Still, any monkey would have found the mission uncomfortable. The shoebox-size capsule was insulated with rubber and fiberglass, and Miss Baker was covered with sensors to record her vital signs as she went into space. On May 28, 1959, Mses. Baker and Able were launched into space on the Jupiter AM-18 mission. When they came back to Earth, they became the first monkeys to go to space and return alive.

Miss Able didn't survive the electrode removal process (the anesthesia was too much), but Miss Baker did. She lost an ounce during flight, but she quickly gained it back quickly thanks to a diet of peanuts, biscuits, fruit, and some milk. She was then rewarded with a comparatively large seven-foot cage, where scientists monitored her progress. For 10 years, the Navy cared for her in Pensacola, and she was even married to a male monkey named Big George, though they never had children.

In the 1970s, the couple moved to the Alabama Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where they enjoyed a large cage and happy captivity. In 1979, Big George died, but Miss Baker was not a widow for long. She remarried to a monkey named Norman, and they lived happily together in old age. She died of kidney failure in 1984 at age 27 (a very old age for a squirrel monkey).

She is buried in Alabama, where she has a stone marker that lists her many accomplishments. If you'd like to pay tribute, you may place a banana on the marker in her memory.

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Monkeys travel to space.

On May 28, 1959, in an experiment that would lead the way to manned space flight, the United States launched two monkeys to an altitude of 300 miles. A Voice of America news report details the travels of the two primates who survived the space flight and were the first in history to return safely to Earth.

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Gordo (monkey) facts for kids

Gordo was one of the first monkeys to travel into space . As part of the NASA space program, Gordo, also known as Old Reliable , was launched from Cape Canaveral on December 13, 1958, in the U.S. PGM-19 Jupiter rocket on its AM-13 mission. The rocket would travel over 1,500 miles and reach a height of 310 miles (500 km) before returning to Earth and landing in the South Atlantic . A technical malfunction prevented the capsule's parachute from opening and, despite a short search, neither his body nor the vessel were ever recovered.

Gordo was a South American species of squirrel monkey , about one foot tall and weighing between 1 and 1.5 kg. He was chosen for space travel because of his species' similar anatomical makeup to man and sensitivity to changes in temperature. Missions using monkeys in space were not new: four monkeys called Albert, as well as monkeys called Patricia and Mike had all flown by 1962.

The flight took place at 0353 hours EST when the Jupiter AM-13 rocket containing Gordo was launched from the Atlantic Missile Range at Cape Canaveral. The rocket ascended to a height of 290 miles while travelling 1300 lateral miles. Scientists monitoring the flight found that, aside from a slight slowing of the pulse, Gordo suffered no ill effects from the entry into space or resultant weightlessness. Gordo wore a specially customized space suit and was fitted with instruments, including a thermometer and microphone, to monitor his health.

In total the flight lasted 15 minutes, of which Gordo was weightless for 8.3 minutes, as the craft exited and re-entered Earth's atmosphere at a speed of over 10,000 miles per hour. The failure of Gordo's parachute meant that both he and the capsule were lost, despite efforts to recover them. It is believed that Gordo was alive at the time of impact.

Despite the loss of Gordo, the mission was considered a success by NASA. It had gone some way towards alleviating the concerns over how the human body would cope with weightlessness and the difficulties of space travel. Less than a year later, Gordo was followed into space by the monkeys Able and Baker who survived a similar launch profile. Despite these advances, though, it would be the Russian Yuri Gagarin who would become the first human in space.

• This page was last modified on 16 October 2023, at 16:53. Suggest an edit .