Today is the anniversary of the day that Enos, the only chimpanzee to orbit the earth, was launched aboard Mercury-Atlas 5 in 1961. It was the final rehearsal of the Mercury program before John Glenn’s orbital flight. Enos completed two orbits, then his capsule reentered the atmosphere and splashed down in the Atlantic. Enos was fine, and rode back to shore aboard the USS Stormes.
You might expect that Enos was simply bundled into the capsule and launched, but nope. The chimp underwent over 1,200 hours of NASA training. The training included airplane flights, simulated weightlessness, and “psychomotor instruction” — which I gather meant that he knew how to really control certain things in the capsule. He wasn’t the only chimp in the training program, and it was apparently a competitive situation; he was selected for the mission from his class of six astrochimps (yes, they were really called “astrochimps”) only three days before launch. One of his astrochimp classmates was Ham, who had flown on Mercury-Redstone 2 in January, 1961. Ham didn’t achieve orbit, but it was by design; her flight was a dress rehearsal for Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight that May.
Ham splashed down safely, but bruised his nose during the process. By all reports, it didn’t bother him. He had helped control the capsule during the mission by pushing a lever when a blue light flashed, which is one of the skills he learned during training. NASA scientists were encouraged that he was only a fraction of a second slower at pushing the lever in the capsule than he’d been during training. At the time they really didn’t know whether the experience of being in a space capsule would impair the performance of a trained astrochimp — and by extension, a trained astrohuman.
One oddity of Ham’s flight is that during the flight — and during his training program — his name wasn’t Ham. During training he was known as “Chop Chop,” and during the mission he was officially “number 65.” He changed his name to Ham (or, well, somebody did) after his mission in honor of the commander of the Hollman Aerospace Medical Center (where he’d been trained), Colonel Hamilton Blackshear. Both Ham and Enos were inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame — or at least, that’s where they were eventually buried.
Just as astrohumans — er, astronauts — are welcomed back to earth with a handshake, both Ham and Enos received welcoming handshakes too, when they emerged from their Mercury capsules. It’s probably not related, but exactly two years after Enos’ mission launch on November 29, 1961, the Beatles released I Want to Hold Your Hand. It immediately hit number two on the charts in the UK. It would have been number one, but the Beatles previous release, She Loves You, stayed in first place for two more weeks. After that, I Want to Hold Your Hand stayed at number one for the next five weeks, and became the Beatles’ best selling single, worldwide. In the UK, though, they liked She Loves You a bit more.
I Want to Hold Your Hand was the first four-track recording by the Beatles. Multitrack recording, where the band doesn’t have to play the whole song all at the same time, was still pretty new at the time. It had only been introduced five years earlier, but it would become the dominant studio recording system for another twenty or more years. By the 1980s, digital recording was taking over from tape, and sound recording and editing were getting even more flexible thanks to computers.
Computer-based sound in 1972, though, was still rudimentary — as you can tell from the first successful video game, Pong — which was released by Atari on November 29. Digital sound was getting better fast, though, so it might be significant that Roger Shah — the German producer of electronic music also known as DJ Shah, was born on the same day as Pong’s release. Shah’s entire career has been digital, and as a DJ, he pioneered the idea of performing without records and without CDs — only a laptop computer. He’s released a number of space-themed electronic pieces, including Skyarium and Star-Crossed, but he never made any music about the astrochimps. Somebody did though: Bark Hide and Horn, a Portland, Oregon band that released Ham the Astrochimp in 2008. The group and the song were profiled in an article in a Portland, Oregon newspaper around that time — the paper is called The Portland Mercury.
