As a precursor to manned space flight, numerous tests were conducted to help scientists make the spacecraft safe to carry humans, including launching animals into space so they could predict how humans would react to the conditions of flight. Animal reactions to flight conditions such as acceleration, deceleration, rotation, noise, and other phenomena would aid in the design of equipment and the training of astronauts.
As the year 1959 marched in, attempts to send animals up and return them had been mostly unsuccessful. As long as a decade before, the United States had launched monkeys and mice in rockets, and in most of these tests the animals died. In November 1957 the Russians sent up Laika, a Siberian husky, aboard the satellite Sputnik 2, but the dog, fed liquids in a specially constructed capsule, died after a few days in orbit when the life support system stopped, its batteries worn out. In December 1958 the Americans launched a squirrel monkey, Gordo (nicknamed “Old Reliable”), but the nose cone the animal was in was not recovered, and Gordo perished. But the Americans had other animals in the wings, tested and trained for space flight, waiting to be selected for an experimental launch.
While the U.S. Army was conducting tests with its Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missiles—a primary goal of the Jupiter program was to develop a way for the nose cones to reenter the earth’s atmosphere without burning up—a biomedical project was undertaken in which primates would be launched into space to determine what effect the missile firing and reentry would have on them.
Rigorous testing was conducted before the final selection of the project’s primates. A program at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research had conducted studies with rhesus monkeys, all less than two years old. Flight conditions were simulated with respect to g-forces, weightlessness, restraint, and other physical phenomena; the researchers maintained copious records of the monkeys’ responses. Three days before the launch, physicians selected from a group of eight rhesus monkeys a seven-pound specimen named Able. At the U.S. Navy School of Aviation Medicine in Pensacola, Florida, a one-pound squirrel monkey named Baker was trained for the same mission.
Because army missiles fell under its domain, the U.S. Army Ordnance Missile Command supervised the biomedical testing. The army’s Ballistic Missile Agency, which supervised the Jupiter program, developed and built the biomedical capsule in which Able was placed. The U.S. Navy School of Aviation Medicine, with ABMA’s assistance, likewise designed and built the capsule for Baker. Input for the biomedical experiment and the design of the capsules came from other armed forces units as well as civilian research institutions. The capsules would be specially equipped not only to maintain the life support of the passengers but to gather and transmit data.
The heating of the nose cone presented a major problem. After a craft is launched straight up, it plummets back into the atmosphere at high speed. The craft experiences tremendous friction as it reaches the upper edges of the atmosphere, and as it reenters the atmosphere it generates intense heat.
American scientists worked to solve the problem of the heating of the nose cone at reentry, making the cones with ablative material that absorbed heat. There were several layers of this ablative material. As the first layer absorbed heat and reached a certain temperature, the layer would fall off, leaving a cool surface underneath. Then that layer would heat up, and after it reached a certain temperature would fall off in its turn, exposing another cool surface, and so on. An August 1957 flight demonstrated that the solution was successful, and with this accomplishment, the next step for the Americans was to conduct medical research on an animal launched aboard a missile in the unused space of the nose cone.
On May 28, 1959, the Americans prepared to send the two primates, Able and Baker, into space in the nose cone of a Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missile. The monkeys were restrained in separate compartments of the nose cone. Able was set in a fiberglass seat with restraints that held her in place, with foam-rubber padding to help prevent injury from being tossed around in her seat. Baker, the smaller monkey, was kept in place in her seat by a perforated metal piece that fit over her body from her chin down (both restraints are at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville, Alabama). A climate-control mechanism utilizing liquid nitrogen kept the temperature inside the cone that carried the monkeys at a comfortable level.
Able, a seven-pound rhesus monkey, is secured in her fiberglass seat prior to her historic space flight.
At 2:35 A.M. in Cape Canaveral, Florida, the missile was launched. Able, wearing a “space helmet” containing headphones that sent sixteen channels of data on her physical reactions to ground scientists, lay facedown. Baker, wearing a plastic helmet, lay on her back on her silicone-rubber bed in a fetal position. The missile, launched on a ballistic trajectory, reached a maximum speed of 10,000 miles per hour and an altitude of 300 miles. At its maximum altitude the missile traveled in the thermosphere, almost into the exosphere. (Space starts about 50 miles above the earth’s surface; the thermosphere is the area 50 to 310 miles above the earth; and the exosphere is the region from 310 miles above earth to deep space.) On the missile’s reentry into the earth’s atmosphere, the temperature of the ablative nose cone (with its two primate passengers) soared to a searing 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, at a downrange distance from its launch site of 1,500 miles.
To recover the nose cone of the Jupiter missile, several navy ships, including destroyers, cruised the splashdown area in the Atlantic Ocean, while navy planes circled overhead. The nose cone had been fitted with paraphernalia to assist searchers in locating it; retrieval apparatus included a brightly colored inflatable balloon with a signal light and a radio communications device. At 3:20 A.M. a navy flier spotted the nose cone and guided several ships to the area where it had splashed down. Several frogmen secured ropes to the nose cone (U.S. Space and Rocket Center, on loan from the Smithsonian Institution), hoisted it aboard, and recovered the space travelers Able and Baker, both alive and apparently unharmed.
The successful flight, from launch to touchdown, lasted approximately fifteen minutes, but its short duration belies its remarkable accomplishment. It marked the first time that primates were launched into space aboard a missile, survived the rough conditions of the journey, and returned alive to earth.
Two sailors aboard the USS Kiowa hold Able after she splashed down with Baker in the Atlantic Ocean.
Indeed, Able and Baker endured the high-velocity stresses of the launch, reentry, descent, and splashdown. The weightlessness and g-force, or pull of gravity, that Able and Baker were subjected to was of prime interest to scientists, as it showed that primates could tolerate these physical changes. During acceleration into space, the animals experienced a maximum g-force of fifteen, then were weightless for nine minutes, and during reentry experienced thirty-eight times the normal force of gravity. Thus on reentry, the seven-pound Able felt as though she weighed 266 pounds. (A 180-pound human subjected to the same g-forces would temporarily experience a weight of over three tons!)
Able and Baker were not only alive but in good health. Researchers compiled the data on their physiological reactions to the journey, as well as on environmental conditions in their space capsules. This information was used by scientists to prepare for human space flight.
Able and Baker were first taken to Puerto Rico, then to Washington, D.C. The monkeys were space heroes, but Able’s days on earth were numbered. On June 1, three days after the flight, a sensor that had been planted under Able’s skin was being removed when she suffered an adverse reaction to the anesthesia she had been given and died. She was subsequently stuffed.
In what may be a reflection of the adaptability of animals, including humans, to extreme changes in conditions, Baker went on to live a healthy life. She was placed in a specially designed habitat at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The cylindrically shaped environment was approximately eight feet in diameter and four feet high with clear Plexiglas walls and a floo
r comprising stainless steel bars covering a drainage system that washed away waste products; the temperature was maintained between 72 and 75 degrees. “Miss Baker,” as she was called, had several mates but never reproduced. She died on November 29, 1984, at the age of twenty-seven—about three times the life expectancy of a squirrel monkey in captivity—and was buried on the grounds of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, adjacent to the front entrance, with a five-foot granite memorial marking her grave and an epitaph citing her birth date, death date, and role in history.
After their May 1959 flight, Able and Baker received substantial attention in the media, but then they were quickly forgotten, probably because advances in space exploration at the time were so rapid that new accomplishments were constantly making headlines. Less than two years later, on April 12, 1961, the Soviets launched the first human being into space, and a little over ten years after Able and Baker were carried aloft, the Americans landed two men on the moon.
In the tense Cold War era, the Russians and Americans were competing fiercely to be the first to accomplish some great mission or other to prove which of their socioeconomic systems was best and to gain military advantage. Early on the Russians seemed always to be one step ahead of the Americans; they sent up the first satellite (Sputnik I), the first dog (Laika), the first cosmonaut (Yuri Gagarin), and the first unmanned spacecraft to land on the moon (Lunik 2), all historic achievements. But while the Soviets were first, their missions were not always completed. The Sputnik I satellite was essentially a transmitter that could be tracked, as opposed to Explorer I, the first U.S. satellite, which was a complete scientific package (it discovered the Van Allen radiation belt). The Soviets put the first dog in space but could not recover it alive. The first Soviet cosmonaut had no control over his capsule, as opposed to the early American astronauts, who had at least a degree of maneuverability. Unlike Able, Baker, and Yuri Gagarin, the astronauts were part of the system instead of just being along for the ride.
The Jupiter-C missile in which Able and Baker were launched, like other U.S. missiles at the time, was a modified military weapon. To mitigate the military implications of the space race, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was formed as a civilian space agency. With NASA, advances in space-exploration technology made by the military were used for peacetime purposes.
With all the fantastic accomplishments of space exploration, and all the monumental missions on the horizon, the space monkeys Able and Baker were pioneers in space exploration and an indelible part of early space history. Indeed, before the human pioneers—astronauts such as Neil Armstrong, Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Edward White, John Young, Frank Borman, and James Lovell, as well as cosmonauts like Yuri Gagarin, Gherman Titov, Andrian Nikolayev, and Valentina Tereshkova—there were Able and Baker, the primate space voyagers, who in their own way helped advance the U.S. space program. These were the first animals to soar beyond the earth’s atmosphere and return to earth alive, a remarkable feat that carved their niche in history. In addition, they also have the distinction of being the first successful female space travelers.
Indeed, the potential for manned space flight received a major boost in the predawn hours of a spring day in 1959 when Able and Baker soared into space and returned safely to earth, suggesting that their more advanced primate cousins could likewise survive the perilous trip. Today, the space monkey Able, frozen in eternal sleep, reminds us of one of the most significant first steps in humankind’s inevitable journey into the cosmos.
LOCATION: National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C.
ODYSSEY
DATE: 1970.
WHAT IT IS: The Apollo 13 command module.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: It is nearly 11 feet high and weighs approximately 13,000 pounds. From its violent reentry into the earth’s atmosphere, Odyssey’s exterior has been burned a rusty orange.
“Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”
— Apollo 13 command module pilot Jack Swigert
“Failure is not an option.”
— Mission Control Flight Director
Gene Kranz to the ground crew
Two hundred thousand miles away from earth, a manned spacecraft is soaring through the vast darkness of space when suddenly an explosion reverberates harshly through the vessel. The main supply of oxygen, power, and water is lost, the mission is aborted, and the three-man crew is faced with a life-and-death predicament. How can they get themselves back home to earth when the backup battery in their command module offers only a fraction of the energy needed to return safely?
What follows is one of the most remarkable tales in the annals of space travel, a testament to the ability of humans to triumph over their machinery when it goes awry in the most perilous of circumstances. And with the vessel that served as a main stage for this dramatic event having survived, we have today a remnant of that tale—a mute, scarred witness to one of the most daring, daunting, and miraculous voyages of all time.
After the Russians had unmistakably moved ahead in the space race by making Yuri Gagarin the first human in space on April 12, 1961, the pride of the United States was deeply tarnished. Three weeks after Gagarin orbited the earth, astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr., became the first American to be launched into space, but Shepard made only a fifteen-minute suborbital flight in which he spent five minutes flying outside the earth’s atmosphere. Although it was an important accomplishment, America’s manned space-flight debut was not as impressive as the Russian mission. The next year, in an address at Rice University in Houston, Texas, on September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy affirmed that America would put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth “before the end of this decade.”
With only limited success in its space program, the idea of the United States being able to send a crew into space to reach the moon in under eight years was not just an ambitious goal, but an incomprehensibly huge task, certainly the vision of a dreamer. But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) relished arduous challenges, and it established the Apollo space program to accomplish the impossible: in a relatively short time, to put a human being on a different world.
The Apollo program began tragically, however; Apollo 1 never made it into space. During routine ground exercises, a fire erupted on the vessel, killing the three astronauts scheduled to make the first manned flight of the program. Unmanned Apollo flights followed, and eventually the first manned mission, Apollo 7, in which the spacecraft, comprising both command and service modules, orbited the earth. Apollo 8 was the first manned mission to go to the moon, but it only orbited the moon without setting any crew members on the surface. The manned Apollo 9 flight tested a lunar module in earth’s orbit, and Apollo 10 was the final dress rehearsal for the first manned lunar landing: the astronauts took their craft’s lunar module into lunar orbit, flying within several miles of the lunar surface but not setting it down. Apollo 11, in which the first lunar landing was made, was truly a historic voyage, and Neil A. Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on another celestial body. Apollo 12 was a subsequent manned mission to the moon to collect soil and rock samples.
Apollo 13 was to be America’s third lunar mission. While the landing crew of Apollo 11 had explored the moon’s Sea of Tranquility and Apollo 12 the Ocean of Storms, the lunar landing crew of Apollo 13 was to explore the Fra Mauro Formation, particularly a hilly upland area north of the Fra Mauro crater, deploying equipment for scientific experiments, conducting geological surveys, and photographing future potential exploration sites. The equipment they would set down to measure such events and phenomena as meteoroid crashes, variations in lunar atmosphere temperature, and heat flow from underground to the moon’s surface constituted ALSEP, the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package.
Three astronauts made up the Apollo 13 crew: James A. Lovell, Jr., the commander; John L. Swigert, Jr., the command module pilot; and Fred W. Haise, Jr., the lunar module pilot. Swigert was actually a backup memb
er chosen to replace Thomas K. Mattingly III after backup lunar module pilot Charlie Duke accidentally exposed the crew to the German measles, and it was found that Mattingly did not have antibodies for immunity to the contagious disease.
There were three major components of the Apollo 13 spacecraft: the command module, named Odyssey; the service module; and the lunar module, named Aquarius. The command-service module (the two components were connected through the flight until reentry) was the main ship—the astronauts would sleep and work in the command module, the vessel’s life-support and propulsion systems being located in the service module—and was the vessel in which the astronauts would return to earth. The two-man lunar module was an ancillary craft that would separate from the command-service module in its orbit of the moon, take the landing party to the moon’s surface, and then, after the lunar mission was complete, ascend to reunite with the command-service module orbiting the moon. The lunar module would be jettisoned back to the moon to test the seismological equipment left on it.
At 1:13 P.M. CST on Saturday, April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 was launched from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The lunar module was scheduled to set down on the moon four days later, on April 15. The landing crew would venture out twice to conduct their explorations and investigations—at 1:13 A.M. and 8:58 P.M. CST, both on April 16. The next day, April 17, the landing crew would depart from the moon to link up with the orbiting command module. Early in the afternoon of April 18, the spacecraft would propel itself out of its moon orbit and splash down in the Pacific after 2:17 P.M. CST on the 21st of April.
For the first forty-six hours the journey to the moon proceeded according to schedule—so well, in fact, that the Mission Control capsule communicator (CapCom), astronaut Joe Kerwin, remarked, “The spacecraft is in real good shape as far as we are concerned. We’re bored to tears down here.”
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