![]() On January 31, 1961, ‘Ham’ became the first chimpanzee to make it to sub-orbital space launched atop an American Mercury Redstone rocket paving the way for the successful 1961 launch of Alan Shepard, Jr. Most of these animals died either during or shortly after their flights or were deliberately killed afterwards, Marino notes. ![]() “These early space missions were deemed too risky for humans and, in the case of Laika, were known to be a one-way trip,” Lori Marino, an evolutionary neurobiologist and president of The Whale Sanctuary Project, told me. There were also many monkeys, mice, cats, insects and even fish who gave their lives unwillingly so that we might explore space, she says. Before humans actually went into space, one of the prevailing theories of the perils of space flight was that humans might not be able to survive long periods of weightlessness, NASA has noted. The American space agency points out that both American and Russian scientists utilized animals - mainly monkeys, chimps and dogs - in order to test each country's ability to launch a living organism into space and bring it back alive and unharmed.
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