Among the staff working on the project, it was Dittmer who was closest to Ham. He had daily contact with Ham, preparing him for his training, guiding him through that training, and overseeing every aspect of his care and well-being. Dittmer’s relationship with Ham (and Enos too) went beyond that of researcher/subject. Ham was a kind of colleague, a chimp with a job to do who relied primarily on Dittmer to help him do it. To do that job, they had to establish a strong working relationship. “I had a very good relationship with Ham, I think,” Dittmer said. “I think—I know he liked me. I’d hold him and he was just like a little kid. He’d put his arm around me and he’d play, you know. He was a well-tempered chimp.”
On January 31, 1961, Dittmer prepared Ham for his flight into space. The team had moved from Alamogordo to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to acclimate weeks ahead of the flight. Training went on as usual. Six chimps were candidates for this first test flight, and Ham was not officially chosen until the day before liftoff. His second was a chimp called Minnie, who would also be prepped alongside him.
Ham would fly on a Mercury-Redstone 2, a liquid oxygen–fueled rocket modified from the Redstone ballistic missile developed by Werner von Braun and his US Army team, the same basic design that put the first US satellite into orbit. Ham would not be flying into orbit, however, but out over the Atlantic where, after reaching an altitude of 115 miles, the capsule would separate from the rocket body, descend on braking chutes, and land in the ocean. Eight navy ships waited in the drop zone to pull the capsule from the water. During the flight, Ham was expected to reach a top speed of 4,400mph and endure about 9g. At 37 pounds, Ham would feel like he weighed 333 pounds.
Dittmer attached electrodes to Ham to monitor his heart during the flight and a respiration sensor. He then helped Ham into his flight suit, strapped him into his capsule seat, attached the shock plates to his feet, and sealed the cover. At 6 a.m. Dittmer accompanied Ham to the rocket. At 7:10 a.m. Dittmer made a final check, looking in at Ham through the window in the cover of his capsule. “It looked like he was smiling at me,” he said in his interview with House.
With Ham ready to fly, the rocket sat on the pad, waiting. Liftoff was scheduled for 9:30 a.m., but twice a team of engineers had to make repairs to bring down the rising temperature in Ham’s capsule. As the team made their way down from the tower the second time, the elevator malfunctioned, and that too had to be repaired. It wasn’t until 11 a.m. that the countdown resumed, and now the weather became a concern, as out over the Atlantic a line of storm clouds was building. It isn’t the wind and rain that pose a danger to a rocket, but rather the possibility of lightning. A lightning strike can damage a rocket’s guidance system and payload, and because rocket fuels are so flammable the whole thing can blow up. The team waited until they got the all clear, and the rocket finally lifted off a few minutes before noon. By this time Ham had been strapped into his capsule for some six hours.
In flight, more problems developed. The engines were burning fuel too fast, resulting in the rocket traveling too fast too soon. Its angle of ascent was sharper and steeper than planned, which meant the recovery teams had to adjust for a new splashdown location. The fuel ran out several seconds early, triggering an abort sequence, which fired and separated the spacecraft from the booster with the force of 17g, a crushing pressure that held Ham’s limbs and head pinned against his seat, pressed back the flesh of his face, and must have made it nearly impossible to breathe. Ham lost focus and abandoned his task at the control panel. The force against him eased up and the electrical plates beneath his feet kicked in, jolting him back to his purpose.
Black-and-white file footage taken by a camera mounted in the Mercury spacecraft is grainy, and it stops and starts in shifting frames like an old-time silent movie, but you can see Ham during his flight, the camera catching the top of his head in motion, and occasionally a portion of his eyes and face. At times his head bobs about in a quiet rhythm, as if he’s motoring down a dirt road in a pickup truck, and then it tosses violently forward and back, his eyes closed, his mouth opened, his lips stretched back, his white teeth and sharp canines visible as he bears the acceleration of the rocket. And then he returns to that soft bobbing as the spacecraft enters microgravity and his eyes come into view in the film, calm and dark. He appears to be completely at ease, performing his tasks at the control panel.
While Ham performed his tasks, the ground crew accounted for the anomaly during engine burn. Ham would remain in microgravity for one minute longer than planned, because instead of 115 miles altitude the rocket had achieved 155 miles altitude and would splash down at least 130 miles farther down range. The anomaly also caused a sudden loss in pressure inside the spacecraft, a drop from 5.5psi to 1psi. Ham’s capsule inside the spacecraft had its own pressure and air system, but had he been inside the Mercury without this protection, the low pressure would have killed him. It would have killed an astronaut too.
For six minutes Ham floated in microgravity performing his tasks, proving that when an American astronaut made the journey he too would be able to endure the acceleration of the rocket and work in space. Then the Mercury spacecraft turned back toward the Earth. On its descent, the braking chutes did not perform optimally, as part of the system had been jettisoned early, so when the capsule hit the ocean’s surface, it hit hard, and in rugged seas. The impact breached the hull and jammed a valve open, and Ham’s ship started taking on water as it rode seven-foot swells. Of course, Ham didn’t know his ship was taking on water, that it was going down, and probably wouldn’t know even when it went down, when it went under, falling to the bottom of the sea, the air running out as he suffocated and died. He would feel a tightening in his chest, an increase in his pulse and respiration, perhaps an adrenalin dump in his body as he panicked, and then it would all slow down and he would drift into a forgotten sleep. But Ham still had time, and rescue was on the way.
It would take the closest ship, the USS Donner, nearly an hour to arrive at the scene. Navy frogmen dropped from a helicopter and attached tow cables to Ham’s capsule. The pilot then drew back on the stick and pulled the spacecraft out of the sea. Suspended from the helicopter, some eight hundred pounds of water drained from the spacecraft as the pilot set it gently down on the deck of the Donner. Ham’s flight, from liftoff to splashdown, had taken seventeen minutes.
The team removed the cover from Ham’s capsule, and there sat the world’s first space chimp, blinking. He was in good condition, though mildly dehydrated from his long wait on the launchpad, and he had bruised his nose during the hard landing. Ham was posed for photographs, one shaking the hand of the Donner’s commander, Richard Brackett. In the photo he appears calm, even happy, still strapped into his seat, his face illuminated by the sun. In another photograph Ham is being offered an apple. He is baring his teeth, as if smiling, as he reaches out for the apple with both hands, his body still strapped against his seat, his black eyes focused. It had been hours since he had anything to eat. That photograph circulated in newspapers all over the world. Here is Ham, the happy space chimp, the captions read, enjoying a postflight snack. He has just returned to Earth after a successful flight into space for the glory of America.