On This Day: Monkeys return from space

May 28: Astronaut monkeys Able and Baker became the first primates to return to Earth from space on this day in 1959 – after a string of earlier animal deaths during test flights.

The pair rode in the nose cone of a Jupiter AM-18 rocket to an altitude of 59 miles and reached speeds of 10,000mph during their flight from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

In doing so they withstood accelerations 38 times the normal pull of gravity and were weightless for about nine minutes.

They splashed down and were rescued from the sea after surviving the flight in good condition.

Sadly, Able, a squirrel monkey, died four days later after an allergic reaction to anaesthesia used to surgically remove an infected electrode.

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Her stuffed body is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Baker, a rhesus monkey, lived until the ripe old age of 27, eventually dying from kidney failure in 1984.

A British Pathe newsreel shows the two primates hopping about on a table during a press conference shortly after their return.

But their success was not shared by many other animals before them.

The first monkey to be sent to space was Nasa’s Albert, who died after crashing to Earth in 1949.
The following year, several mice died aboard a U.S. space flight.

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In 1951, Soviet dogs Tsygan and Dezik became the first ‘living higher organisms’ to survive a trip to space, although one later died on another mission.

Laika, another Russian dog, became the first animal to orbit the Earth in 1957, although she died as the USSR had not yet developed the technology for her to return.

A year before Able and Baker’s flight, Gordo, a squirrel monkey, died after his parachute failed upon his return.

Animals continued to be sent into space, although the number of flights has dwindled since humans finally took the first giant leaps there in the 1960s.

However, Iran sent its first monkey into space this year as part of a recently launched programme.

Although there are doubts about whether it survived as the animal that was supposed to have returned looked different to the one seen departing.

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