Historic Photographs Capture the Training of Ham the Chimp and Other Astrochimps in 1961

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Well before the USSR launched the world’s first artificial satellite, in 1957, and obviously long before the U.S. put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, Americans and Soviets used animals to test the rigors and dangers that humans might face in outer space. Mice, rhesus monkeys, dogs—all sorts of creatures blasted off from the surface of the Earth strapped atop rockets and locked in test planes. Many suffered injury; not a few of them died.

Ham and his cohorts were picked for the Mercury program over other hominids (gorillas and orangutans) because they were smaller and could fit in the Mercury capsule and also because “chimpanzees have physical and mental characteristics similar to man,” as LIFE pointed out in its Feb. 10 1961 issue.

The most famous of the Mercury chimps, due to his landmark January 1961 flight, Ham was not publicly called Ham when he went into space. That name—an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center—was only widely used when he returned safely to earth.

The training of Ham and other astrochimps was a scaled-down version of the human astronauts’. After curing them of jungle diseases and parasites, a special corps of veterinarians … kept track of their skeletal development by periodic X-ray exams, and gave them regular heart, muscle, and ear-nose-and-throat check-ups.

All are pre-adolescents amenable to teaching. All are active, bright, and light in weight — some flunked out of the program by growing to over 50 pounds in weight. While America relied on chimps and other primates—rhesus monkeys, for example—as suborbital test subjects in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviets commonly used dogs.

The astrochimps were not trained to “pilot” space capsules, but instead to perform routine tasks during suborbital flights, and to act, in the most elemental way, as test subjects facing little-known physical and psychological perils ahead of their human counterparts in the Mercury program and beyond.