The name of Ham it may not be familiar to most fans of space exploration. But we are talking about the identity of a character who was essential for a crucial moment in the history of the POT.
Today we will address the general details of the first chimpanzee astronaut trained by the agency and who managed to break ground for what was the greatest goal pursued by this institution: to take man into outer space.
There is already little more than half a century of history in the NASA Space Agency and with such a long time, there are dozens of stories that are worth telling.
The height of tension and competition came at the height of the cold war, where the space race against the Russians to get up there first into the sky was fierce with many unexpected twists.
Yuri Gagarin marked a before and after by seriously increasing the pressure on the space agency and it was there in this context that a primate ended up saving them.
Ham: the NASA chimpanzee who went into space
This January 19, 1983 It was the 40th anniversary of the death of Ham, the legendary chimpanzee astronaut who also had the distinction of becoming the first hominid to travel to space.
By the early 1960s, NASA was ready for its first real human spaceflight program. But as it would be obvious to expect, it was necessary to comply with some parameters and security measures before uploading a human being to a spaceship.
They called this initial preparatory project the mercury program. Its operations began preliminary in 1958 and ended in 1963. In itself, this initiative was NASA’s response to the leadership of the Soviet Union during the Cold War in the special race.
During the Mercury program, American engineers faced the challenge of building safe ships for their crews while the first trained specimens were chosen to travel in these prototypes.
Thus, after an intense evaluation, they ended up choosing chimpanzees as the ideal species to participate in this project. The participants received daily training and were exposed to the G force. Based on rewards and punishments with electric shocks, they all learned to activate the necessary levers when it was essential in flight.
The January 31, 1961, Ham was chosen for the most critical flight, where he flew to be about 25,000 meters from Earth. He thus became the first hominid to reach space.
It was in the morning of April 12, 1961 when the Soviet Union made history, sending the first man into outer space, a great advance for humanity, which was immersed in a tight space race between the USSR and the United States, the goal was the Moon, but the first step was this .
The cosmonaut’s name was Yuri Gagarin, he was 27 years old and was aboard the Vostok 1 capsule that orbited the Earth only once.
The mission-experiment lasted just 108 minutes, at a speed of about 28,200 km/h, reaching a maximum height of 327 kilometers, a distance less than that in which the International Space Station is located.
That was enough to go where no man had gone. But before him he had already been surpassed by a chimpanzee from NASA.
