--- title: In Praise of America's Astrochimps | TIME description: In 1961, a chimpanzee named Ham blasted off from Earth atop a NASA rocket — becoming the first primate in orbit and ratcheting up the already intense Space Race. canonical: https://time.com/video/GOpYcUwL/ og:title: In Praise of America's Astrochimps og:description: In 1961, a chimpanzee named Ham blasted off from Earth atop a NASA rocket — becoming the first primate in orbit and ratcheting up the already intense Space Race. og:url: https://time.com/video/GOpYcUwL/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/GOpYcUwL/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: In Praise of America's Astrochimps twitter:description: In 1961, a chimpanzee named Ham blasted off from Earth atop a NASA rocket — becoming the first primate in orbit and ratcheting up the already intense Space Race. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/GOpYcUwL/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # In Praise of America's Astrochimps > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: In Praise of America's Astrochimps [Watch (HLS stream): In Praise of America's Astrochimps](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/GOpYcUwL.m3u8) (2:12)  _Published 2014-02-10. In 1961, a chimpanzee named Ham blasted off from Earth atop a NASA rocket — becoming the first primate in orbit and ratcheting up the already intense Space Race._ --- Jul 27, 2023 4:12 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [How America's Best Place to Live Got to Be That Way](/video/el1Spg4I/) ### How America's Best Place to Live Got to Be That Way [This Is How You Resurrect America's Dying Malls](/video/Zbvt9iWn/) ### This Is How You Resurrect America's Dying Malls [Remembering Ham: America's First Astrochimp](/video/t3oRADO6/) ### Remembering Ham: America's First Astrochimp --- ## Transcript On the morning of January 31, 1961 a 5- year- old chimpanzee named Ham ate a breakfast of baby cereal, condensed milk, vitamins, and half an egg. Then the unassuming 37- pound primate went out and made history. Traveling thousands of miles an hour more than 100 miles above the earth, Ham became the first chimp in space. The success of Ham's flight helped ratchet up the already frantic race for space supremacy between the United States and the Soviet Union and briefly made Ham a star. Long before the US put astronauts on the moon in 1969, Americans and Soviets used animals to face the dangers that humans might encounter in space. All sorts of creatures blasted off from the surface of the earth on rockets and in test planes. Many suffered injury, more than a few died. Ham and his chimp cohorts were picked for the Mercury program because they're smaller than other hominids and fit quite nicely in the Mercury command module. The chimps were not trained to pilot their space capsules. Instead they performed routine tasks during flights and acted as test subjects before their human counterparts took the controls. More importantly chimpanzees have physical and even some mental characteristics that roughly speaking are pretty similar to humans. When his capsule was opened after the flight, LIFE magazine reported first the hand was thrust out to shake the anxious vets then Ham stepped out burping proudly. Ham died at the North Carolina zoo in 1983. The most famous astrochimp of them all was 26 years old. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"In Praise of America's Astrochimps","description":"In 1961, a chimpanzee named Ham blasted off from Earth atop a NASA rocket — becoming the first primate in orbit and ratcheting up the already intense Space Race.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/GOpYcUwL/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2014-02-10T18:11:51.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/GOpYcUwL.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/GOpYcUwL/","duration":"PT2M12S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/GOpYcUwL/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```