Laika's Window

by Kurt Caswell

  At Edwards, Stapp built the so-called Gee-Whizz machine, running trials with 185-pound mannequins or crash dummies. File footage shows all kinds of mishaps: the sled coming off the tracks, the restraining harness snapping and vaulting the mannequin hundreds of feet beyond the sled, the mannequin’s head popping off. Chimpanzees rode the Gee-Whizz machine too, in various positions, and under anesthetic so that whatever happened to them, they would not know it. To simulate a plane crash, or perhaps a crash landing in a spacecraft, chimpanzees were positioned headfirst and lying down. Reports indicate that the maximum deceleration experienced by these chimpanzees was a top speed of 169mph stopping within eighteen feet, which resulted in a momentary g-force of 270, far beyond the g-force possible in an accelerating rocket. Death was nearly certain. According to Burgess and Dubbs, one of the researchers working on the project described what became of the chimps after these tests as “a mess.”

  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.

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  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 profes
sional people,” Dittmer said, “and they didn’t want no monkey business as far as the animals.”

  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.

  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.”

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  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.
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br />   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.