“That implies that they have some sort of agency.” When it comes to space chimps, “We shouldn’t try and anthropomorphize them in ways that make them seem like little astronauts,” Bimm says. Enos’s story is an important part of space history because he made John Glenn’s orbital flight of February 20, 1962, possible, but it’s also a dark tale worth interrogating with clear eyes and without assumptions. By contrast, Ham the chimpanzee, whose January 31, 1961, suborbital flight paved the way for Alan Shephard’s subsequent suborbital mission aboard Freedom 7, would grace the cover of LIFE Magazin e.Īnd that sort of celebration is part of the ethically dubious legacy of early animal spaceflight, according to Bimm. They would have much preferred that be Colonel John Glenn.”Įnos would probably have preferred John Glenn take his seat too, as Bimm notes some fairly horrific spacecraft malfunctions resulted in a harrowing flight for the chimpanzee, who afterward was mostly ignored by the press. “That’s not the kind of record the human astronauts really wanted to see. “Enos is interesting because he’s actually the third hominid in orbit,” University of Chicago space historian and National Air and Space Museum Guggenheim fellow Jordan Bimm tells Inverse. That is, Enos the Chimpanzee, who was launched into orbit in a Mercury capsule on November 29, 1961, much to the chagrin of the human Mercury astronauts. In terms of the human family, as most broadly defined, the first three to orbit around Earth were Soviet cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov and American astronaut Enos.
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