Madrid, 29 years old. (Europe Press) –
60 years ago, on January 31, 1961, the chimpanzee Hamm became the first president to make a trip into space and The United States gave hope to remove astronauts from Earth.
Hamm belongs to the Center for Space Medicine in Holoman (USA), where he learned to perform some of the basic functions of piloting a ship. Thanks to your training, Hamm managed to reach an altitude of 253 kilometers and stayed for seven minutes in weightlessness.
The trip was made within the Mercury Project to Simulate what the first human astronaut will experience. The Redstone 2 missile took off without incident, but a problem with the rocket’s throttle regulator resulted in an acceleration that would not be resolved until it ran out of liquid oxygen.
Although the flight lasted 16 minutes 39 seconds, and the capsule landed in the Atlantic Ocean, 679 kilometers from the take-off point, the chimpanzee was, according to NASA, The first “aura of hope” men can in the near future travel to space.
And before Ham, the US Space Agency had already tried, up to six times, to send monkeys to outer space. But none of them could survive the flight.
Two months later, on April 12, the Soviet Union gave the bell with the first manned orbital flight in which Yuri Gagarin starred.. The United States was not able to send an astronaut away from Earth until May 9, with Alan Shepard, and it was only a suborbital flight. It will be John Glenn, already in May 1962, who will match Gagarin’s achievement in orbital flight.