Today in History: Ham the Chimp Reaches Space

On this day (January 31) in 1961, Ham the Chimp rode Mercury—Redstone 2 into space. The short flight was riddled with problems that forced an automatic abort. The whole flight lasted 16 minutes and 39 seconds and the capsule came down out of sight of the recovery vehicles. More problems caused the capsule to flood with seawater but Ham was successfully recovered. The flight proved to NASA that they were not yet ready to send humans into space. Ham retired to the National Zoo where he lived for 17 years before being transferred to a zoo in North Carolina where he could live with other chimps. He died in 1983 at the age of 26.