![]() He then splashed down about 200 miles from Bermuda and was successfully recovered by the USS destroyer, Stormes. During his flight, he reached an altitude as high as 147 miles above the Earth. Regardless of this accomplishment, NASA still felt it was necessary to gather their own data on the subject first and, on November 29, 1961, they launched Enos into space and he successfully orbited the Earth.ĭue to technical complications during the flight, primarily problems with the altitude control system that resulted in more fuel usage than originally anticipated, Enos did not complete the full mission of orbiting the Earth three times, rather did it twice. Before the launch, many questioned whether launching a chimp into orbit as a trial run before launching humans was really necessary given that a few months earlier the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin successfully orbited the Earth with no ill effects. ![]() Three days before the launch of the Atlas 5 mission, Enos was selected from the remaining potential chimps to be launched. His name was chosen as it means “man” in Hebrew. As such, Enos was purchased from a bird farm about a year and a half earlier and given around 1250 hours of training. ![]() Towards this end, chimpanzees were chosen for certain test missions to observe the effect being in space would have on near-human physiology. Project Mercury ran from 1959-1963 the primary objective of this program was to put a human being in orbit and land him safely back on Earth. Enos, along with many other chimps such as “Ham”, the first chimp to be launched into space, were trained as part of Project Mercury, which was the first manned spaceflight program in the United States. ![]() On this day in 1961, Enos the chimpanzee was launched into space, becoming the second chimp to travel to space and the first to orbit the Earth. ![]()
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