Pioneering primates

The U.S. Air Force was the first to launch primates into space. Instead of chimps, smaller monkeys were their preferred choice. But those early missions didn’t go well — for either human or animal.

In 1948, a decade before the creation of NASA, the Air Force strapped a male rhesus monkey named Albert into a capsule on top of a souped-up, Nazi-designed V-2 rocket and launched it from White Sands, New Mexico. Poor Albert suffocated before he reached space.

The next year, a monkey named Albert II was sent on a similar mission. Unlike his predecessor, Albert II succeeded in becoming the first monkey to survive a launch and reach space. Unfortunately, on his journey home, Albert II died when the capsule’s parachute failed. His spacecraft left a 10-foot-wide crater in the New Mexico desert.

In 1951, the Air Force finally managed to keep a monkey — this one named Albert VI — alive through both launch and landing. But his capsule failed to reach the boundary of space, leaving him out of the record books.

The honor of first primates to survive a return trip to space goes to a squirrel monkey named Miss Baker, and a rhesus macaque named Able. The pair were launched in 1959 on a Jupiter rocket, an intermediate-range ballistic missile designed to carry nuclear warheads, not monkeys. Sadly, Able died just days after returning to Earth due to complications from a medical procedure.