The first monkeys and chimps sent into space by NASA mostly suffered horrible fates in the name of scientific research.

Before mankind took the giant leap, we sent our monkey cousins into space to suss out the great unknown for us.

With little knowledge of how the human body would respond to escalated altitudes, U.S. researchers sent primates into the sky as test subjects. Let's just say that the results were not favourable for the poor little guys.

The first of many to be sent up in a V2 rocket by NASA was a rhesus monkey named Albert in June 1948. Sadly, Albert only made it as high as 63km above ground before he died of suffocation.



Albert I (NASA)

Exactly a year later a second monkey named Albert made it to an altitude of 134km, making him the first primate to actually reach space heights. But even though Albert II survived the launch, he died upon impact when his parachute failed to open on the way back down.

Alberts III and IV perished during their flights in late 1949, and Albert V suffered another parachute malfunction in 1951.

With a fresh new moniker, Yorick the space cadet (previously known as Albert VI), survived his 72km flight in 1951. However the bad omens associated with his original name came back to haunt the animal, who suffered fatal heat exhaustion under the hot New Mexico sun while waiting to be released from his cramped metal capsule.

1959 marked a milestone in monkey space travel. Not only did a squirrel monkey named Miss Baker and rhesus monkey named Miss Able reach the astounding new height of 483km aboard a Jupiter rocket, but they also came back alive.



Miss Baker (NASA)

But the good news was short-lived (pardon the pun) as Miss Able lasted only several days before a medical operation to remove an electrode proved fatal and she joined her intergalactic comrades in monkey heaven.

Miss Baker, however, went on to live a long and happy life, becoming a national treasure. She married twice and eventually died of kidney failure in 1984 at the ripe old age of 27. People still lay bananas at her grave in Huntsville, Alabama.

A rhesus monkey named Sam (an acronym for the U.S. Air Force School of Aviation Medicine) took off on a Little Joe rocket aboard the Mercury capsule in December, 1959. After reaching an altitude of only 82km, the spacecraft was aborted but landed safely in the Atlantic Ocean. Sam was safely recovered after his short journey.



Sam (NASA)

Soon after, in January, 1960, Sam's mate Miss Sam was also launched in a Mercury capsule. This mission proved even less fruitful, only reaching an altitude of 15km before also landing in the Atlantic Ocean nearby the launch site. No monkeys named Sam were harmed in either mission.

While Russia was busy sending dogs into the sky and France was experimenting with intergalactic cats, America's tests with monkeys paved the way for larger primates, and eventually humans to be sent on space odysseys by the U.S.

Chimpanzees — being more closely related to humans — seemed like a natural choice for NASA to experiment with next.

A chimp named Ham embarked on a suborbital spaceflight in January 1961, achieving an altitude of 253km. While he was a bit dehydrated, Ham came out of the 16.5-minute flight unscathed, signalling another success for researchers.



Ham (NASA)

The Soviet Union's Yuri Gagarin became the first human to ever reach space when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961. Shortly after, on May 5, 1961, American astronaut Alan Shepard became the second person and the first American human to travel into space.

Shepard's Mercury mission was designed to enter space, but not achieve orbit. The first American to orbit the Earth was a chimp named Enos who flew into space aboard Mercury Atlas 5 on November 29, 1961. It took him one hour and 28.5 minutes to orbit the Earth and while he landed safely, an equipment malfunction meant that he suffered repeated electric shocks during the flight.

Despite his traumatic on-board experience, Enos' mission paved the way for John Glenn's famous orbital flight on February 20, 1962.



Enos (NASA)

While human space travel was becoming safer and thus more popular, it did not put a complete halt to primate experiments in space.

A large squirrel monkey, aptly named Goliath, was killed in an Air Force Atlas E rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in late 1961.

In 1969, a pig-tailed monkey named Bonnie spent nine days in orbit before suffering a fatal heart attack brought on by dehydration.

During the 1980s, the Soviet Union began putting pairs of monkeys into orbit in a series of satellites called Bion. This continued up until Bion 11 was launched on December 24, 1996, carrying the monkeys Lapik and Multik on a 14-day flight that Multik did not recover from. The monkey's death finally shone light on the questionable ethics of using animals for research and the Bion missions ceased.

Iran, late to the party, began trying to send monkeys into space in 2011 after experimenting on a rat, turtle and worms. In 2013 they claimed to achieve success when a monkey named Fargam was blasted 120km above Earth's surface atop a liquid fuelled rocket in a 15-minute mission.

Luckily, the Iranian monkey did not suffer the sad fate of many of his foreign friends. Fargam made it safely back to Earth, ending our tale of space monkeys on a high note.