64 | Animals in Space A squirrel monkey, Baker, in bio-pack couch being readied for the Jupiter AM-18 flight, launched on May 28, 1959 The Jupiter, AM-18 mission, also carried an Americanborn rhesus monkey, Able, into suborbit The flight was successful and both monkeys were recovered in good condition Able died four days after the flight and Baker died in November 1964 (NASA) rats, a grey rabbit, and 15 flasks containing plants and fruit flies The flight was a success, and Strelka later gave birth to six puppies one, of which was presented to President John F Kennedy as a gift for his children Arguably the most famous animal astronaut of all was a four-year-old West African chimpanzee called Ham (his name was an acronym for Holloman Aero Med) who, having been chosen from a short list of six astrochimps, on January 31 1960, donned his spacesuit and boarded the Mercury Redstone rocket at Cape Canaveral to become the first chimpanzee in space Reaching a record speed of 5,857 mph and an altitude of over 155 miles (both due to technical problems) Ham was weightless for 6.6 minutes of his 16.5-minute flight He landed dehydrated and fatigued to be rewarded with an apple and half an orange, but went on to live a healthy life until 1983 His body was preserved by the Smithsonian Institute, which has permanently loaned it to the International Space Hall of Fame in Alamogordo, New Mexico Without Ham, America would not have been able to launch its first human astronaut, Alan B Shepard, Jr., on May 1961, though by then the Soviets had already orbited Yuri Gagarin around the Earth for almost two hours on April 12 of that same year, following their successful Kotabl dog launches While the Soviets had chosen dogs over monkeys for their experiments (because they fidgeted less), the Americans preferred chimpanzees over dogs because they were more similar to humans Some of the technical defects observed during Ham’s flight were not corrected until November 1961, when a chimpanzee named Enos orbited the Earth twice The mission plan had called for three orbits, but the flight was terminated early due to technical difficulties, which included a thruster malfunction Without this further animal testing, John Glenn would not have been able to orbit Earth in 1962 That year, Enos was reported to have died at Holloman Air Force Base of a case of dysentery unrelated to his space travel Equally unfortunate was Goliath, a squirrel monkey killed on November 10 1961