In January 1961, a chimpanzee named Ham was strapped into a Mercury capsule and launched on a suborbital arc that overshot its target by roughly 240 kilometres, and when the hatch was opened aboard the USS Donner, he was found alive, slightly dehydrated, somewhat exhausted, and carrying a small abrasion across his nose

The mission was an operational test of the Mercury spacecraft, its environmental controls, the recovery system, and the ability of a trained primate to keep working through acceleration and weightlessness. The sealed couch protected Ham from the flooding, but the capsule was listing by the time a Navy helicopter lifted it from the Atlantic. Who Ham was before the flightNASA’s contemporary report identifies Ham as an immature male chimpanzee acquired by the U.S. Air Force on 9 July 1959. Six candidates were brought to Cape Canaveral before Ham and a backup chimpanzee named Minnie were selected. NASA’s Project Mercury chronology records that the mission qualified the spacecraft for John Glenn’s orbital flight.