Anesthetized hogs were used too, strapped into rocket sleds in an upright position with a harnessing system. Working in the research repository and library at the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, I came across an air force file photograph of one of these hogs. A documentation card placed in the photo reads: “Project Barbecue, Run #22, 5 August 1952.”
On the museum grounds is one of the decommissioned rocket sleds, this one called the Daisy Track. It was decommissioned in 1985 and later restored for display. The Daisy Track was powered by compressed air, not unlike the Daisy air rifle it is named after, and the sled was stopped by something called a water brake. If you walk along its length—now painted a bright aqua blue—you sense a vestigial drama that once unfolded here. At least four black bears were anesthetized and strapped into the Daisy Track to endure about 20g, and then euthanized and dissected as researchers hunted for internal injuries. In 1958 Captain Eli Beeding made a run on the Daisy Track with two albino rats. He faced backward, away from the direction he was going, while one rat faced forward and the other was strapped to something called an anti-g platform. The sled malfunctioned, coming to a stop more suddenly than planned and dramatically increasing the g-load. The rat on the anti-g platform came through just fine, which I suppose means the device worked. The rat pointed downstream on the track suffered but recovered. Beeding took a hit of 83g. Researchers later determined that had he been facing forward, the ride would have killed him.
On December 10, 1954, Stapp made his final test run, this time on a sled known as the Sonic Wind I. He was bound tightly to the sled so that no part of his body could move. Captain Joe Kittinger (who held the world record for the highest skydive until Felix Baumgartner broke it in 2012) flew a T-33 chase aircraft down the track line, and the sled pulled away from it. The sled hit a top speed of 632mph (nearly Mach 1) in five seconds and then came to a full stop in 1.4 seconds. Burgess and Dubbs write that it was the equivalent of “hitting a brick wall in a car travelling at 120 miles an hour.” While the crew unstrapped him, Stapp noticed his vision was blurred. He thought perhaps he’d torn both his retinas and might be blind for the rest of his life. He recovered though, proving that a pilot could eject from an aircraft or capsule and likely survive.
Not far from the Daisy Track on the grounds of the New Mexico Museum of Space History, I visited the burial site of Ham, the first primate in space. The museum is located on a hill at the western edge of the town of Alamogordo, the dry flank of the Lincoln National Forest running up behind it. Ham is buried before a sun-struck concrete marker adorned with blackened and desiccated bananas laid in by well-wishers and announcing the International Space Hall of Fame. But Ham (his name is a derivative of Holloman Aeromedical Research Laboratory at the nearby Holloman Air Force Base, where he lived and trained) has not been inducted into the hall of fame. Only human beings have received that honor so far. Nor even is all of Ham buried here, only the cremated remains of his skin and viscera. His bones lie in a drawer at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, having been cleaned by a colony of flesh-eating dermestid beetles.
After Laika and the space dogs, Ham is probably the most famous animal to fly in space, along with his counterpart Enos. It was Laika’s flight that brought newly formed NASA to Holloman asking to put a chimp into space. If the Soviets could fly a dog into orbit, surely the Americans could fly a chimpanzee. And as our closest relative, the chimpanzee is the perfect test animal to prepare the way for the first human spaceflight. The US still had a chance to put up the first man, and to put up the first man and not kill him you had to test the equipment on an animal you could kill. Holloman already had a chimp colony for research, and the air force began to train some forty chimps for spaceflight. Ham and Enos emerged as the best of the best. They would test the rocket and capsule life-support systems for Project Mercury’s seven astronauts in training, whose story was made famous by Tom Wolfe’s book and the subsequent movie The Right Stuff.
Ham was born in equatorial Africa sometime in July 1957. Captured by animal trappers, he came into possession of the Miami Rare Bird Farm, a kind of breeding facility and tourist attraction (now defunct) from which the air force purchased him for $457. He was a wee chimp when he came to Holloman, weighing in at 19 pounds. Compare that to his flight weight of 37 pounds four years later, then the heaviest animal shot into space, and his gargantuan 175 pounds in retirement, first at the National Zoological Park in Washington, DC, and then at the North Carolina Zoological Park, where in 1983 he died of liver failure and an enlarged heart.
By the late 1950s plenty of animals had been shot into space and brought back alive, proving that living organisms could manage increased radiation and microgravity, at least in the short-term. What NASA did not know was if a man could work in space, and if he could perform the tasks required to operate a spacecraft. In addition to testing the life-support systems of the Mercury capsule, sending a chimp into space would help answer this question.
Ham and Enos were both trained to operate a series of dummy levers inside the Mercury capsule. Strapped into a chair, the chimps sat before a control panel with three lights, each with a corresponding lever. Burgess and Dubbs report that on the far right was a red light that glowed all the time, indicating that the chimp should not press this lever. In the middle was a white light that switched on when the chimp pressed the lever, which he was trained to do every twenty seconds. On the far left, a blue light came on unpredictably during an interval of two minutes, prompting the chimp to press the lever. If the chimp made an error, he was given an electric shock through a metal plate to which his feet were strapped. Because the chimp did not want to get shocked, he did not want to make a mistake. If a chimp could ascend into space on a rocket and return safely to Earth while performing these tasks with the levers, the research team reasoned, then a man could operate a spacecraft on a journey into space.
The chimps were trained by a team led by Master Sergeant Edward Dittmer, an aeromedical technician who began his career in the US Army in 1943 and then transferred to the air force in 1947. In 1955 he came to Holloman. The project was classified, and initially not even Dittmer knew why he was training the chimps. In an interview with George House, then curator at the New Mexico Museum of Space History, Dittmer said, “I never questioned anything because a lot of things at that time were classified and the less you knew of classified, the easier it is to keep it classified.” But it soon became clear to him that the air force planned to use these chimps in rocket research. Dittmer was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 2001 and died at the age of ninety-six in 2015.
As with the Soviet team working with dogs, the care of the chimp colony was of great importance to Colonel Stapp, the ranking officer on the project. “Stapp had chimpanzees for years prior to this—and he was very, very particular with the colony,” Dittmer said. “Anyone that mistreated an animal or anything else, they were out the door. He didn’t put up with any nonsense with his animals.” The veterinary staff too were “all very professional people,” Dittmer said, “and they didn’t want no monkey business as far as the animals.”