Packing For Mars (12 page)
Enos, your name is cleared.
A BLOW-DRYER wind has knocked over the flowers on Ham’s grave. I’m out here squinting in the noon sun, eating a sandwich and thawing out after a morning in the museum’s aggressively air-conditioned archives. Now I know the story behind the plaque. The same confusion that surrounded Ham while he was alive continued when he died. The International Space Hall of Fame was bombarded (their wording) by inquiries from the media and the public about the fate of his remains. It was something of a quandary. What’s appropriate protocol for a dead space chimp? Memorial service or incinerator?
The Air Force’s position was made clear in a draft of a letter by a Colonel William Cowan: Ham was a historical artifact. Cowan, repeatedly referring to Ham’s remains as “the carcass,” recommended that following the necropsy (the animal version of an autopsy), the skeleton be removed from the body and cleaned of flesh in the Smithsonian’s dermestid beetle colony and then sent to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology archives.
Ham’s hide had already been removed, in case the Smithsonian wished to prepare a taxidermied specimen. This seemed like a bad idea to me. I saw a photograph of Ham taken ten years after his flight. He had gained more than a hundred pounds over the course of his retirement and lost some of his teeth. Others protruded at unfetching angles. He was unrecognizable as the flight-suited, pink-faced youngster from the Life cover. He looked like Ernest Borgnine.
But no one asked my opinion. The Smithsonian announced plans to stuff Ham and add him to “the indoor Ham exhibit” at the International Space Hall of Fame, an exhibit that consisted at that time of “a photo of Ham.” The public went bonkers. The archives has a few of the letters. “Gentlemen: Ham is a national hero and not a thing…. Do you propose to stuff John Glenn as well?” “A chimpanzee is not a stuffed pepper.” Et cetera. The Washington Post, under the inevitable “The Wrong Stuff” headline, took the nation’s indignation a step further in an op-ed that insinuated Communist proclivities on the part of the Smithsonian. “The only national heroes we can think of who are stuffed and on permanent display are V. I. Lenin and Mao Tse-tung.” (In keeping with the Communist proclivity for stuffing heroes, Soviet space dogs Belka and Strelka stand side by side in glass cases in Moscow’s Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, faces raised as though staring at the heavens or anticipating a treat.)
A follow-up announcement was quickly drafted. Ham would not be stuffed. He would be given “a hero’s burial” in a small plot in front of the Hall of Fame flagpoles, “similar to the final resting place of Smokey the Bear.”* What remained of Ham following a necropsy, a skeleton extraction, and the removal of his hide is difficult to imagine. Whatever it is, one has to assume, is what’s down there under the flowers.
The museum now had to come up with a suitable memorial service. They needed a respected public figure willing to say a few words about Ham’s contributions to manned space exploration in the United States. Clearly heat-struck, their public relations person sent off a letter to notable Ham detractor Alan Shepard. The letter pointed out that Shepard would enjoy “national attention from all areas of the media.” As though Alan Shepard, the first American man in space, wanted or needed media attention. In particular, at an event that would yet again have him sharing the spotlight with a chimp. The letter-writer acknowledged the “jokes and sometimes ‘unfunny’ humor about the situation.” The quotation marks were an ill-advised touch, seeming to suggest that the letter-writer herself found the jokes funny.
A reply arrived on letterhead from the Texas-based Coors distributorship where Shepard served as president, thanking the museum for the “thoughtful invitation” and expressing regrets. The letter was typed by Shepard’s secretary, initials JC. There was no signature. Undiscouraged, the Hall of Fame public relations staff next went after John Glenn, by this time not just an astronaut but a senator and a presidential candidate. Glenn politely declined, citing previous commitments.
A brief news story on the ceremony ran in the Albuquerque Journal. A photograph accompanying the article showed a loose crowd of maybe forty people standing around the flagpole area. “Colonel Stapp made a short speech and members of Girl Scout Troop 34 of Alamogordo laid a wreath on a small memorial plaque.” Stapp ran the crash sled research program at Holloman Air Force Base. In both aerospace and automotive safety studies, Holloman chimps were regularly used in impacts deemed too hazardous for airmen. Which made Stapp both an appropriate and inappropriate choice. He was intimately familiar with the heroic sacrifices of man’s closest cousin; he’d signed the paperwork on most of those sacrifices himself. The tribute was respectful, if short on sentiment*—one of those rare eulogies to incorporate numeric G force figures.
Enos had no memorial. A log book of Holloman chimp acquisitions† includes the note “remains at Smithsonian,” though no one there seems to know where he ended up. Animals in Space author Chris Dubbs spoke to someone whose mother had dissected Enos’s eyes to study the effects of cosmic radiation, but the man knew nothing about the rest of the chimp. This suggests that the body was parceled out for research. Which is the usual and appropriate fate of a research subject.
For better or worse, that’s what Ham and Enos were. They played a vital role in the country’s space efforts, but I would not use the term “heroes.” For the simple reason that no bravery was involved in what they did. A courageous feat is one undertaken with an understanding of the dangers involved. As far as Ham knew, January 31, 1961, was just another strange day in the little metal room. Alan Shepard may not have been using the expertise of a test pilot, but he was certainly using the guts. He let himself be strapped in a canister on the nose of a missile and blasted into space: an insanely dangerous feat undertaken by, at that point, only one other man.
The decision to put a chimpanzee in space before an astronaut was not, in either instance, an easy one. NASA had to weigh concern for the Mercury crew and lack of confidence in the hardware against the enormous pressure to best the Soviet Union. The early days of the Apollo program would be plagued with the same mixture of urgency and caution. Having watched the USSR rack up space firsts—first man-made satellite, first orbit of a live animal (Laika), first recovery of live animals (Belka and Strelka) from orbit, first man in space and in orbit, first spacewalk—the United States was ever more determined to reach the moon first. NASA was working furiously on President Kennedy’s publicly announced time line: By the end of the 1960s, America would put a man on the moon. Or anyway, something pretty close.
First U.S. Flag on Moon May Be Planted by Chimp
BETWEEN MAY 1962 and November 1963, veteran Associated Press reporter Harold R. Williams filed four stories based on visits to a new chimp facility at Holloman Aeromedical Research Laboratory. “Chimp College,” as he called it, was a million-dollar expansion of the grotty-looking facilities where Ham, Enos, and other chimps had lived and trained for the Mercury missions. It featured a staff of twenty-six, brand-new “dorms” with an outside run attached to each cage, a surgical suite, a kitchen, and a curriculum of “new, complicated and secret” tasks. Williams’s series ran in dozens of U.S. newspapers under various headlines like the one above, almost all of them highlighting the possibility of a lunar mission: “First from U.S. to Moon? Chimponauts* Hard at Work on Secret Space Program.” “Holloman Monk May Be First on Moon.” “Space Chimps’ College Grad May Hit Moon.”
Williams described college “Ph.D.” Bobby Joe as he sat at an instrument panel mock-up, effortlessly maneuvering a joystick to keep a crosshair centered inside a circle. “There is no question about it,” said Williams’s guide, a Major Herbert Reynolds, who would go on to become president of Baylor College of Medicine. “He could guide a space vehicle into space and bring it back.” On a different visit, Williams peered through the window of a “simulated space vehicle” at a chimp named Glenda. Glenda had been inside for three days, sleeping and working on the same shifts an astronaut would have. She had two days left to go.
Five days is what it took the Apollo 11 astronauts to reach the moon and plant the American flag. Was it true? Had NASA and the Air Force been planning to beat the Soviets to the moon by sending a trained chimpanzee on a one-way mission? A round trip was certainly out of the question. Lifting off from the moon and docking with an orbiter was beyond the capabilities of an ape. But a straightforward moon shot and capsule touchdown could be managed from the ground, just as unmanned rovers are landed remotely today.
The trickiest part would be finessing the public relations debacle of a dead chimpanzee hero. Best not to take a cue from the Soviet playbook. In November 1957, a mellow and patient Moscow street dog* named Laika, traveling suitless in a pressurized capsule, became the first living creature to orbit the home planet. Alas, there was no plan or means to bring her safely back down. For over a week, Soviet officials were mum on the topic, refusing to say whether Laika was still alive. They ignored inquiries from media and animal rights groups, until the clamor and outrage had all but eclipsed the glories of their achievement. Finally, nine days after the launch, Radio Moscow confirmed that Laika was dead. The particulars were left to speculation. In 1993, Laika’s trainer Oleg Gazenko told one of the authors of Animals in Space that she’d perished when a malfunction caused her capsule to overheat, just four hours into her flight.
Perhaps less scandalous to send a willing human. In 1962—the same year that Williams filed his Chimp College pieces—a story ran in a Sunday newspaper supplement called This Week suggesting that the USSR was considering sending a cosmonaut on a one-way lunar landing mission. That same year, according to space historian Dave Dooling, Missiles and Rockets, Aviation Week & Space Technology, and Aerospace Engineering all detailed a similar mission proposal making the rounds at NASA. The “one-way, one-man” lunar expedition was the brainchild of a pair of Bell Aerosystems engineers, John M. Cord and Leonard M. Seale. “It would be cheaper, faster, and perhaps the only way to beat the Russians,” Cord is quoted as saying. Dooling points out that intelligence data gathered at that time suggested that the Soviets would be capable of landing a craft on the moon as early as 1965. (The United States landed on the moon in 1969.)
Neither the Soviet nor the American version proposed leaving the sad spaceman to die on the moon. Someone would come pick him up in one to three years—just as soon as they figured out how to do it and built the hardware. A total of nine launches would follow his own, delivering a living module, communications module and equipment, construction equipment to build the modules, plus the 9,910 pounds of food, water, and oxygen he was projected to consume while waiting around for his ride.
And who would agree to go? “It is sincerely believed,” wrote Cord and Seale, “that capable and qualified people could be found to volunteer for the mission even if the return possibilities were nil.” I believe it. There are astronauts today who happily would sign on for a one-way mission to Mars. This scenario holds no eventual return trip. Rather, the crew would live out the rest of their lives with help from unmanned resupply landers. “I’ve spent my life training to go into space,” astronaut Bonnie Dunbar told New Yorker writer Jerome Groopman. “If my life ends on a Mars mission, that’s not a bad way to go.” Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, said in a 2007 interview that reaching Mars was the dream of the early cosmonauts and that she would love, at seventy-two, to realize that dream: “I am ready to fly without coming back.” Though years or decades of resupply launches might not be cheaper or easier than figuring out the technology to make fuel for the ascent engines out of Martian resources. Or putting fuel and hardware for the return trip onto those unmanned landers, instead of survival supplies.
Dooling thinks it unlikely that anyone at NASA gave serious thought to Cord and Seale’s one-way moon mission. But it does lend credence to the possibility that the aerospace community had—however fleetingly—considered launching a one-way chimped mission.
I went back and reread Williams’s AP stories. Outside of the headlines, there were no specific references to a lunar mission. Were the newspaper* editors taking liberties to make the story more provocative? I needed another source. Major Reynolds is dead. Jerry Fineg had left Holloman by 1962. Both he and Britz said they didn’t recall hearing anything about it, though Britz recalled seeing rhesus monkeys at Brooks Air Force Base, near San Antonio, being taught to operate a joystick. “They were trying to see if they could actually fly,” he told me in an email. “They were good!” Britz didn’t know what the ultimate goal of the project had been. I do know chimpanzees were being trained for space-related tasks at Brooks as late as 1964, because I found a paper that referred to a chimp injured in the spacecraft simulator when the foot plates malfunctioned and delivered more than the customary “small but annoying” electrical shock.
Air Force historian Rudy Purificato is at work on a history of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the other hotbed of aerospace medicine research in the sixties. I sent him a note. “There could very well have been actual plans to send a chimp to the moon,” he replied. He added that most of the primate research was still classified, and in that case Fineg and Britz (and Purificato) couldn’t talk about what they knew. So who would have told the AP reporter? He had probably, Purificato said, benefited from a “slip-up” by someone he interviewed.
Holloman Air Force Base is a ten-minute drive from the New Mexico Museum of Space History. Perhaps the base archives could provide some answers. The curator here at the New Mexico museum, George House, gave me a phone number to try. The staff played hot potato with my call until someone could locate the Person in Charge of Lying to the Press. The PCLP said that the room that houses the base archives is locked. And that only the curator would have a key. And that Holloman currently has no curator. Evidently the new curator’s first task would be to find a way to open the archives. Now I was sure of it: the chimp-to-the-moon files were locked up in there along with the Enos in-flight sex tapes and pictures of Colonel Stapp in a tutu. Paranoia is a way of life here in Alamogordo, home of the first atomic bomb test and not far from Roswell and Area 51, the secretive Air Force experimental aircraft proving ground/UFO hub. House said that emails containing the word primate, including some from me, mysteriously disappear en route to his computer. But House didn’t think it had anything to do with secret chimp moon missions. He said it had to do with a lawsuit filed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The suit isn’t against the Air Force per se, but rather the facility they’d contracted to take over the care—“care” being a rather gross overstatement—of the chimpanzee colony in the 1970s, when the Air Force no longer had use for them. Oh.