Some years later the renowned primatologist Jane Goodall examined these photographs of Ham. In an interview for the documentary film One Small Step, she remarked that the look on Ham’s face “is the most extreme fear that [she had] ever seen on any chimpanzee.”
With the success of Ham’s test flight, the US was now ready to send a man into space. They chose Mercury pilot Alan Shepard, but before they could get that done the Soviets put Yuri Gagarin into orbit. Shepard went up about a month later, and like Ham, he did not enter orbit. He went up to 116 miles altitude and came back down. Still playing catch-up to the Soviets, the US would next test its readiness to orbit a man around the Earth. That’s where Enos came in.
Enos was not a friendly chimp like Ham. “He wasn’t really mean” either, Dittmer said in his 2012 interview with George House. “He just didn’t take to cuddling. That’s why in any pictures you ever see of Enos, you don’t see anybody holding him.” When moving Enos from his living quarters to training stations, he had to be led by a strap connected to his wrist. He didn’t care much for the company of people and was prone to nipping and biting when agitated, and the strap helped keep a bit of distance between the handler and those sharp teeth. When officials came to the base and toured the chimp colony, Enos sometimes threw feces at them as they peered in through the cage. And he had developed the unsavory habit, when he had such an audience, of pulling down his diaper and stroking his penis. Airmen at Holloman began to call him “Enos the Penis.”
The rocket carrying Enos ascended into the sky on November 29, 1961, at 10:08 a.m. Enos endured a lift maximum of 7.8g, and then the rocket settled into its arc and pushed out into Earth orbit. The flight plan was to orbit Enos three times and bring him back down. During the flight and in orbit, Enos worked the levers on the control panel. According to Burgess and Dubbs, trainers had also incorporated rest periods in his work, and he took these rest periods as he was trained to do. At one point the capsule began to heat up, but then it returned to a tolerable temperature range. Following that, a wiring malfunction caused several undeserved electrical shocks through the bottom of Enos’s feet, but he kept to his program, pulling levers and then resting as scheduled, the spacecraft whirling around the Earth.
Before flight, the medical team had fitted Enos with an internal balloon catheter to prevent him from playing with his penis. In training, they had first tried an external catheter, but Enos quickly and easily removed it. Then they tried an internal catheter, but Enos pulled it out. So for his big flight, they inserted a balloon catheter, in which the catheter tube extends from a plastic balloon inside the bladder, inflated with water, the tube of which runs down through the urethra and out the penis end. To pull that out when the balloon was inflated would not only require a great deal of strength; it would also be very painful. Enos left it alone, but certainly he didn’t like it. And why did the team go to such trouble to prevent Enos from masturbating anyway? Was there some danger to masturbating in space? Would it interfere with his tasks onboard the spacecraft, or was it rather that the ground crew found it unsightly?
In flight, Enos worked the control panel, pulling this lever and then that lever in sequence, as he was trained to do. He did everything just right, but the wiring malfunction kept the shocks coming into the bottom of his feet. Zap. Zap. Zap. He worked the levers faster to get those shocks to stop. They always stopped, those shocks, when he worked the levers properly. And he was working the levers properly. It was the only thing he knew how to do, but the shocks kept coming. Zap. Zap. Zap. He hammered away at the panel. Zap. Zap. Zap. He hammered away. And then, his frustration rising, he came into awareness of another awful problem: what was this thing down his shorts? Enos reached into the folds of his flight suit, grasped the lead end of the bubble catheter, and pulled it out. The pain must have been unsurvivable, drawn deep from the middle of his body as the bubble, still inflated with water and the long tube attached, came sliding out. But then it was over, and Enos was likely filled with a pleasant sensation of relief and ease. As that feeling of pleasure overtook him, Enos did the only sensible thing he could do: he reached down to dandle himself. We know this because it was all caught on film. What we will never know for certain is whether Enos was merely rubbing the source of his pain after pulling the catheter out or on his way to finishing off the world’s first space jack.
Enos completed his first revolution of the Earth, and on the second trip around, somewhere over western Australia, the spacecraft began to tumble. The thrusters were not all working properly, and later the team would find that a stray piece of metal had clogged a fuel line. But in the moment they knew only that the spacecraft was tumbling, burning fuel erratically, and the problem was getting worse. If they let the ship make its third orbit, it might not have enough fuel to power the thrusters, stabilize the ship’s attitude, and drop it out of orbit and back into Earth’s atmosphere. With only twelve seconds remaining before Enos was committed to a third orbit, the team aborted the mission. They brought the Mercury spacecraft down, Enos still working the levers as he fell through the atmosphere, the spacecraft and capsule heating in its speed until it splashed down in the south Atlantic near Bermuda. The crew of the USS Stormes pulled it from the sea. When the hatch opened, Enos leaped into Dittmer’s arms.
The flight had lasted 3 hours, 21 minutes, and Enos had lived and worked in microgravity for 181 minutes. The team discovered that the temperature inside his capsule had peaked at 106 degrees. Enos would not have been able to tolerate that kind of heat for a third trip around. Still the mission proved that the US was ready to put its first man into orbit, and on February 20, 1962, the great John Glenn achieved that feat.
What became of Enos, the chimp who tested the hardware to make Glenn’s flight possible? He retired to the Holloman chimp colony, where about a year later he died of dysentery. As Burgess and Dubbs note in their research, there is no memorial to Enos, and after a routine necropsy his remains were probably thrown out.
The year before American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon, the Soviet Union sent two Horsfield’s tortoises around it. In their Zond 5 spacecraft, the tortoises, along with some mealworms, wine flies, plants, seeds, and bacteria, were the first living things to make a circumlunar voyage. In the pilot seat rode a 154-pound mannequin with radiation detectors inside.
Soviet chief designer Sergei Korolev had been more interested in a crewed mission to Mars and was working on his gargantuan N-1 rocket to achieve that dream, but his government steered him to the moon. Why? Likely because in 1961 President Kennedy publicly announced America’s commitment to putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The USSR had already racked up a string of firsts in the Space Race, but its leaders wanted to bag the moon first too. Like most everything the Soviets did in those days, their moon program was a state secret. They denied working on the project until 1990, when glasnost pulled back the curtain from a great many Soviet secrets.
Korolev was charged with leading two moon programs, one to take a crewed spacecraft around the moon and back to Earth, and the other to land a crew on the surface of the moon. His death in 1966 was a major setback in those efforts, but his two teams kept on with their work. Trial after trial of Korolev’s N-1 rocket resulted in explosion and catastrophe on the launchpad or just above it. By using a smaller rocket to launch the Zond 5, the circumlunar project was going along rather well. The US would not equal that flight for another three months with Apollo 8, which flew a crew of three astronauts around the moon.