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Chimps Fly First in Mercury Program | This Week In Space History
Weightlessness, Orientation, Mental Acuity, /i>
Editor’s note: This is part one of a two-part story
by michael shinabery
“Enos was a good chimp. He was smart but he didn’t take to people,” Ed Dittmer, who trained primates at the Aero Medical facility at Holloman Air Force Base, said in a 1987 oral history. “A lot of people had the wrong impression of Enos. They said he was a mean chimp and so forth, but he wasn’t really mean. He just didn’t take to cuddling.”
Enos’ two-orbit flight was a major accomplishment in the Cold War-era Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The ultimate goal of either side was, of course, to beat the other to a manned lunar landing.
“The Moon remains the primary target,” Sky and Telescope declared in the March 1962 issue, which hit newsstands the month after John Glenn orbited the Earth.
Before venturing out of Earth’s atmosphere, however, NASA bet chimps would prove humans could not just survive, but live and work in space as well.
“NASA was keen to ensure that a human would be able to perform simple tasks when weightless for lengthy periods,” said “Animals in Space” (Praxis, 2007). “It was also thought that orbiting astronauts, seeing the world passing so quickly beneath them, might even lose their normal concepts of up and down, speed and direction, and become confused. … To resolve many of these questions, Holloman was asked to provide suitably trained candidates and prepare them for an orbital space flight. The chimpanzees would be tested for their ability to remember increasingly complex commands in set patterns.”
“Animals would get the honor of going first, making sure the equipment and procedures worked as planned,” Loretta Hall wrote in “Out of This World” (Rio Grande Press, 2011). “They would have to learn complex tasks, which they would be expected (to) perform during a space flight to demonstrate whether they could function normally under flight conditions.”
Chimps were chosen because they “are intelligent and trainable. They can sit in human-like postures and use their hands to perform tasks. Their internal organs are arranged much like those of humans. And their reaction time (0.7 seconds) is very close to that of humans (0.5 seconds).”
Training took place in phases. Hall described how the chimps were taught to sit for “extended periods of time” in “small recliner chairs,” and then in a “custom-fitted fiberglass couch that could be used in a space capsule.” She said training for the tasks to be performed included recognizing different colored lights that signaled accompanying levers that needed to be pushed.
Enos’ mission was known as MA-5: “M” for the Mercury capsule, and “A” for the Atlas rocket. To prepare, he underwent more than 1,200 hours of training over 16 months, Ted Spitzmiller documented in “Astronautics: Book 1 – Dawn of the Space Age” (Apogee, 2006). Chimps were ideal test subjects “because they had the ability to learn a variety of tasks that could be performed … during a flight to determine the ability of a primate to make cognitive functions under the same conditions that the astronaut would face.”
Duties to be learned for the orbital flight, said “Animals in Space,” were more complex than earlier training. Technicians programmed a board to “illuminate three symbols – circles, triangles and squares. When two symbols the same shape lit up, each subject had to press a button below the non-matching third. Every time they got it right a banana-flavoured (stet) pellet popped out of a tube near their mouth. … A small green light would also illuminate during other tests. If the chimp noticed this and pressed the button to turn it off with 20 seconds, the reward was a drink of water or fruit juice from another tube near their mouth.”
An incorrect action incurred an “annoying electrical shock (that) would tingle the chimp’s feet – an unmistakable sign that something had not been done correctly.”
As training progressed, the animals’ rote reactions took on intelligent reasoning.
“As they grew conditioned to the test sequence the animals would reach their own count of 49 deliberately slowing as they approached the end of their task, and then place a hand under the tube for their banana pellet reward on the last pull,” said “Animals in Space.” “Trainers were amazed at how quickly their playful charges learned this trick. The astute chimps hardly ever got it wrong.”
The ultimate test would be the chimps’ Mercury space flights.
“It was important,” “Animals in Space” pointed out, “that the subjects memorised (stet) the order in which they did their tests, as one of them would be performing them in orbit. If space flight had no effect on a primate’s ability to do simple tasks, then there was no doubting man’s ability to do the same.”
The Mercury capsule that would carry out the United States’ first manned orbital flight arrived at Cape Canaveral on Feb. 24, 1961. Known as Spacecraft No. 9, according to NASA’s “Project Mercury: A Chronology” (1963), the mission would carry the chimpanzee Enos into orbit later in the year, on Nov. 29.
As the date approached for the chimps to launch, trainers moved the animals from Holloman to Cape Canaveral to prepare, and choose which chimps would make the trips.
The chimpanzees HAM, left, and Enos train for their space missions. – NASA
Part two of this article will appear next Sunday on Moonandback.
Michael Shinabery is an education specialist and Humanities Scholar with the New Mexico Museum of Space History. E-mail him at michael.shinabery @ state.nm.us.
Source: http://moonandback.com/2014/02/23/chimps-fly-first-in-mercury-program-this-week-in-space-history/
