The Astrochimps: America's First Astronauts

by Dawn Cusick

Meet Ham, Minnie, Enos, Roscoe, Tiger, and Rocky.

When the United States was scrambling to catch up to the Soviets after their successful launch of Sputnik, they didn’t turn to Mercury Seven astronauts Alan Shepard and John Glenn. Rather, they began bringing chimpanzees to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico for a top-secret program. The goal? To do everything America needed to make space travel safe for humans and beat the Soviets.

Based on extensive research and interviews with living members of the team of veterinarians, handlers, and psychologists who worked with the animals, The Astrochimps offers a fresh perspective on animal intelligence and the rise of the space age. Detailed back matter provides resources, space mission stats, and calls to action for young readers to honor the astrochimps’ legacy and advocate for the humane treatment of chimpanzees today.

Vividly depicted at work, at play, in and out of spacecrafts, these chimps played an under-appreciated part in helping the United States win the Space Race.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Middle Grade, Animals, Childrens, Science, Space

216 pages, Hardcover

Published February 6, 2024

About the author

Dawn Cusick is blessed with many talents. She combined her writing and artistic skills and spent nearly twenty years working an in-house author and editor for a craft book publisher, producing titles such as Tabletop Fountains, The Michaels' Book of Arts and Crafts, and multiple editions of Quilt National. Her fascination with science and nature has now led her to create children's science books.

In between books, Dawn teaches biology at a community college in western North Carolina, where she lives with her husband, two sons, and not nearly enough cats.

Reviews

[Sesana]

Middle grade nonfiction focusing on a fascinating but usualy glossed over aspect of the space race. I thought I knew a fair bit about Ham, the first chimpanzee in space. The program was actually a lot more intensive and lasted a good deal longer than I had realized. I do think the individual chapters are unusually long for middle grade nonfiction, up to 40 pages. The longest chapters could have been divided in half, and there is some room for trimming here and there. I think readers in the target audience who are very interested in either space or animals will get sucked in, and that's not a small group of kids.

[Theediscerning]

A fascinating alternative to the standard histories of the US space race, this shows what NASA owed to a handful of highly trained (and highly temperamental) chimpanzees. There were initially over a hundred numbered chimp subjects of the programme, and despite all the urging from the Mercury Seven humans, it was Ham the chimpanzee who first went to space under a US flag. Here then is the whole gamut of information about how they were trained to do what they needed to do both on earth and above it, to prove the human brain could cope with space travel, all the drama of Ham's bodged trajectory and awkward recovery, and more.

All told, this is excellent – to a point. It starts with a very modern apologia for the whole idea of it, even there being a "bird farm" for some of the captured chimps to be bred and grown at. Nowhere is it shown that all the research done on these potential chimponauts helped us know just how creditable and intelligent they actually were, counting to fifty as they proved they could do, and more. Nowhere is it pointed out that feeding the beasts a bottle of soda each night might not have been ideal for them. Nowhere does it really delve into the contrasting ideas of the Soviets, and cosmocanines like Laika are barely mentioned, save a certain gift to the Kennedy administration.

But this is still a wonderful eye-opener. You can feel the anger from the test pilots with their thousands of hours of experience, being forced to play second-fiddle to some button-pushing banana-munchers. You can easily imagine the pride some of the beasts would have had in mastering their tasks for their human handlers, and then finding the reality of 17g when forced to undergo it by accident. And it is imbalanced in the way just a few actual space chimps take up so many pages as opposed to all the brave humans and scientists and engineers the space race also involved. But as the last pages prove there is a lot of false information about these characters out there, and this is a perfect corrective for that. Many an adult space fan will learn a lot from this readable and engaging all-ages story. In probably being the best book on this theme we're likely to get, it's more or less a full five stars.

[Wren]

It's interesting to read the details of how chimpanzees help with the space race by being passengers on rockets. We learn about the hordes of humans there to help train them, check their health, and work on the rockets that would send them into space and back again.

I knew that chimpanzees traveled in space before humans, but I had not even imagined all the details that went into their participation. I thought they were just passively put on the flights to see what would happen. No, there was a lot of planning to accommodate them. And the chimpanzees interacted with the ship more than I realized. Nevertheless, they still underwent a lot of monitoring to see how a mammal would function in space. It's amazing how much NASA could do to design, train, and monitor these early pilots (technically, research subjects).

The book also describes how the chimpanzees were settled into life after working with NASA. It's good to know what happened to them after science was done using them to help prepare for human flights! For example, Ham ended up in the North Carolina Zoo.

This could be an interesting book for a whole language classroom unit, and a fun read for a kid who is interested in primates or astronauts, or medicine. I may find this appealing because was alive during the space race, but I think many younger people would be interested in how science and technology develops through models, trials, analysis and redesign.

[Sandy Brehl]

Speaking as someone who was a kid during the heated years of the space race, the chimps involved in USA's early flight efforts triggered many memories. Televisions were rolled into our classrooms to watch each of the launches described, because each one was a make-or-break situation.
Even so, the background story about the chimps involved (how they were obtained, trained, supported (or not), and also resented by the original seven astronauts had never Brennon my radar. The accounts are very readable, thorough, and objective, but make clear the ways in which the years-long-process revealed the remarkable intelligence and empathy of the chimps and also the ways in which the chimps were not treated/managed ih ways our current patterns would allow.
There are enough photo images, kid-friendly phrasing, and effective pacing to convey a credible sense of the space race tensions and also the pressures behind the decisions surrounding these first astronauts!

[Jeni Enjaian]

(Actual rating: 2.5 stars)
Once again, I struggle to see what about this book made it something to recommend. The book starts with a prologue in which a little bit of the author's feelings regarding the use of these chimps in the space program slips through and taints the main portion of the book a little. Then, in the main section, the author spends a chunk of time discussing the origins of the program, the training of the chimps and the two flights on which the chimps partook. By the time the narrative got to that point, the author succumbed to the temptation of almost all space race related books to tell at least a brief history of space exploration from that point which, in this case, had no real bearing of the main point of the book. This does not seem like the kind of book that many, if any, middle schoolers would have interest in.

[Raina]

Fascinating historical research into the group of chimpanzees sent into space prior to American human space flight. Lots of (black and white) photos of the real chimps and information about how they were trained. Written as narrative nonfiction, but based on Cusick's interviews with the veterinarians who worked with the chimps, and others who were there. Love primary research.
I took this out to local middle schools in 2025-2026, and focused in on the section on pages 53-55 describing the process of locating and recovering the first spacecraft successfully launched with a chimp inside. It's a wild story - I was torn on where to cut the book's account off. It became one of my most popular booktalks this year.

[Liz]

A book about the real first American astronauts. The chimpanzees' work shouldn't be diminished because they went through the same training and with less understanding and consent than the Mercury Seven astronauts. The first two chapters are pretty dense with the intricacies of the program. It picks up after that. It talks about the all male squad (and the sexism), animal rights, and the back and forth Space Race during the Cold War. A thoroughly research book. For those who want to learn everything they can about space.

[Alexa Hamilton]

Incredibly interesting look at the first American living beings in space, the drama around it, how they were trained, what happened afterwards, how the human astronauts handled it and more. There are a great selection of photos here, too, along with resources at the back to find more information. There's also a good amount of coverage about the Space Race and all the issues there. Not always the fastest read but an interesting read.

[Karen]

Before Apollo, before Mercury, there were Enos and Ham and Rocky, chimpanzees who were the first American astronauts. Details the painstaking training regimen, the resentment from the Mercury Seven who were anxious to get to space, and the thrilling danger of space travel. A piece of space history not often in the spotlight.

[Lori]

Such a great topic, but the editor did not do their job. It rambled and still managed to jump over interesting things. Like ooh, would they go to the moon was a whole section. The next session just moved past the first moon missions to later ones. So I guess they didn't?? I can't imagine a kid actually getting through this!

[Mary]

A clearly written, well-researched tale that should fascinate young teens who are interested in outer space or animal stories. It has its sad and disturbing moments--we've come a long way in understanding just how intelligent and emotionally complex chimpanzees are--and for that reason I'd recommend it for older kids and even adults. Read for the Bank Street children's book committee.

[Fred Walker]

This book is written for tweens/teenagers but is great for adults. The amount of history and detail was great, I thought I knew some history but I learned a lot. There was a lot more that went on, much more than just putting a monkey in space before Glenn.

[Joshua Lawrence]

Clearly written for teens, but damn if I didn’t go “heh, cool” every couple of pages which is exactly what I wanted.

[M.]

It was a good read.

[Sarah]

This would be a great book for middle schoolers, and I also learned a lot.
This is a Goodreads giveaway.

[Hoover Public Library Kids and Teens]

Meet the chimpanzees who had the right stuff to beat the Mercury Seven astronauts into space.

[Caroline]

Before America sent astronauts to the moon, before we even sent astronauts to space, NASA recruited and highly trained a group of unlikely space explorers -- chimpanzees. In the early 1960s, there was no doubt that America was losing the Space Race. The Soviet Union had successfully launched Sputnik into orbit and it seemed like America was far behind, everyone was desperate to be the first man in space and to claim that important victory for the Americans. But NASA was reluctant to send pilots into space without further testing so their answer was Chimp College. In Fort Holloman in New Mexico, a group of chimpanzees were trained in cognitive testing to get ready for space travel. And, in 1961, a chimpanzee named Ham was the first U.S. astronaut in space.

Using archival photographs and first-person accounts from Chimp College, this book takes a footnote from the Space Race and lets these chimpanzees take center stage. Both informative and gripping, this narrative is a must read for any young readers who are interested in space. Readers might be shocked by the treatment that these intelligent primates received. Undergoing physical and mental testing and enduring some of the most intense g-force of any space travelers, all while facing ridicule from NASA's human astronauts who were envious that apes were stealing their spotlight. A fascinating narrative nonfiction book that transports readers back to the height of the Space Race.