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Enos Performs Well | This Week In Space History
by michael shinabery
Editor’s note: This is part two of a two-part story
Six chimpanzees trained at the Aero Medical facility on Holloman Air Force Base left southern New Mexico on Jan. 2, 1961. Their destination was Cape Canaveral.
Accompanying them were 20 “medical specialists and animal handlers,” according to “Animals in Space” (Springer-Praxis, 2007). The strategy behind the trip was to “help stabilise (stet) the animals,” and “enable the preparation team to practise” (stet) with them, as NASA readied for the upcoming Mercury flight carrying a chimp.
To protect the candidates – HAM wouldn’t get the nod until “ninety minutes before lift-off” – the colony was split in two. That would protect them “against common human diseases or illnesses, such as colds, mumps and measles, which could easily delay a flight.”
“We did not want to be wiped out at the launch site and left with no candidates,” said Lt. Col. Rufus Hessberg, project officer at the 6571st Aeromedical Research Laboratory, quoted in “Animals in Space.” “What we were doing was similar to the care that was later taken with the astronauts. You have a back-up for each astronaut and they are fed from different kitchens with different foods and different people preparing it to preclude any possibility of an infection break-out. Even the handlers assigned to one group were not allowed to mingle with those tending to the other trio.”
On Jan. 31, over a15-minute mission, HAM (an acronym for Holloman Aero Medical), proved weightlessness did not negatively affect the brain’s ability to think and perform. Enos’ flight on Nov. 29, 1961, would confirm that finding. Yet again, preceding the mission, the “chimp candidates” and the Holloman personnel “gathered at Cape Canaveral,” Loretta Hall wrote in “Out of This World” (Rio Grande, 2011). This time there were five chimps, including HAM who, said “Animals in Space,” didn’t seem “at all keen to go on a second mission.” He “tackled his tests with little enthusiasm,” and Enos became “the star pupil.”
Enos’ liftoff began smoothly. “The capsule separated from its Atlas booster 305 seconds after leaving the launching pad,” the January 1962 Sky and Telescope reported. Achieving the first of three planned orbits, Enos began to perform his tasks, “an on-board 16-mm movie camera” recording his actions, Ted Spitzmiller documented in “Astronautics: Book 1 – Dawn of the Space Age” (Apogee, 2006). As the flight progressed, however, the website iml.jou.ufl.edu said “two malfunctions occurred.” Any task Enos performed incorrectly resulted in a shock to the chimp’s feet. “The first malfunction occurred in the lever for the motor skills test and Enos was shocked rather than rewarded for each correct answer. As a tribute to Enos, or perhaps his rigorous training, he continued to perform his required operations correctly despite the repeated shocks.”
“His rate of correct responses to all four of the problem types was very close to his preflight averages,” Hall said. “This convinced NASA staff that (three) hours of continuous weightlessness would not cause disorientation or inability to function normally.”
“The second malfunction,” iml.jou.ufl.edu said, “occurred in the Atlas rocket’s thruster system and, luckily for Enos considering his unfortunate predicament, mission control ended his flight after two orbits of the Earth.”
NASA, in “Project Mercury: A Chronology” (1963), attributed the “failure” to “a roll reaction jet and to the overheating of an inverter in the electrical system.” NASA pointed out that “both of these difficulties could have been corrected had an astronaut been aboard.”
After splashdown, Enos, often described as ornery, wasn’t content to patiently await recovery.
“He had freed an arm from its restraint, gotten inside his chest harness, and pulled off the biosensors that the doctors had attached to record his respiration, heartbeat, pulse, and blood pressure,” Mercury astronaut John Glenn wrote in his autobiography, “John Glenn: A Memoir” (Bantam, 1999). “He had also ripped out the inflated urinary catheter they had implanted, which sent his heart rate soaring during the flight. It made you cringe to think of it.”
“After the successful flight of MA-5,” Sky and Telescope said, “NASA staff members began studying proposals for modifying the Mercury capsule so that it could carry a man.” Glenn piloted the MA-6 mission on Feb. 20, 1962, completing three orbits; which made him the first American to orbit Earth.
Not everyone appreciated the value of the chimp program, including political pundits. Spitzmiller said a cartoon “in a newspaper the following day” showed “a chimp in a space suit … walking away from his spacecraft with the caption reading, ‘We’re a little behind the Russians but a little ahead of the Americans.’”
“The public said, ‘Ho, hum,’ and the rest of the world laughed,” Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton wrote in “Moon Shot” (Turner Publishing/1994).
Enos “died about six months after the flight” from “shigellosis,” Ed Dittmer, who trained HAM and Enos, said in his oral history at the International Space Hall of Fame in Alamogordo, NM. The bacterial infection, a “dysentery,” is indigenous to Africa where Enos was born.
“Once it gets hold on (chimps), it’s just impossible to treat,” Dittmer said.
Where his body ended up, no one seems to know.
“What little attention was given to Enos’ death focused not on his courageous mission,” iml.jou.ufl.edu said, “but rather that Enos had not died as a result from his adventure in space.”
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/2014/03/02/enos-performs-well-this-week-in-space-history/
