IN JANUARY 1961, NASA sent a chimpanzee called Ham to the edge of space, riding on a slender rocket hastily adapted from a medium-range army missile. Ham's mission, a preliminary to launching astronauts on similar suborbital hops, lasted 16 minutes and carried him a mere 700 kilometres from his original launch site on the east coast of Florida.
Although some of the rocket's equipment malfunctioned during the short ride, Ham was eventually plucked from the Atlantic Ocean after splashdown, frightened and wet but unharmed. Even so, the new man in the White House, John F. Kennedy, was not that impressed by the whole thing. His science adviser, Jerome Weisner, warned him: "A failure in our first attempt to place a man into space would create a situation of serious national embarrassment. We should stop advertising this as our major objective."
But Kennedy soon warmed to space travel and became a ...
18:00 07 October 2008
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