It was also shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and the Adelaide Festival Literary Awards.Īlice tweets as and blogs at Space Age Archaeology.In terms of the human family, as most broadly defined, the first three to orbit around Earth were Soviet cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov and American astronaut Enos. Space Junk vs the Universe: Archaeology and the Future" (2019) won the Mark and Evette Moran NIB People's Choice Award for Non-Fiction and the John Mulvaney Book Prize, awarded by the Australian Archaeological Association. She is a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Advisory Council of the Space Industry Association of Australia and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Her research focuses on the archaeology and heritage of space exploration, including space junk, planetary landing sites, off-earth mining, rocket launch pads and antennas. She is an Associate Professor in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University, where she teaches the Archaeology of Modern Society. Alice Gorman is an internationally recognized leader in the field of space archaeology. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.ĭr. Read the original article.įollow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates - and become part of the discussion - on Facebook and Twitter. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. The calls of a wild chimp were recorded on the Voyager Golden Records, now heading out beyond the Solar system. We don’t send animals into orbit any more as proxies for human experience. On November 26, Enos the chimp completed an orbit. Ham’s spaceflight made him more than animal, but still less than human.Ī mere 10 weeks after Ham’s feat, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space when he orbited Earth on April 12. Ham was leapfrogging to the front of the evolutionary queue in a Planet of the Apes-style interspecies competition. In some versions of the famous “March of Progress” illustration of human evolution, the first figure is a knuckle-walking ape and the last is an astronaut. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, being controlled by machines was felt to diminish masculinity.Ĭhimps in space also threatened the accepted evolutionary order. This refers to an ongoing battle among both Soviet and US astronauts about how much autonomy they would have as pilots. “He can’t make any decisions, we might as well have a robot up there,” says Major Nelson. They are envious that Sam gets to go to the Moon before them. In the I Dream of Jeannie episode “Fly me to the Moon” (1967), astronauts Tony Nelson and Roger Healey train Sam the chimp for spaceflight. In a scene from the 1983 film The Right Stuff, based on Tom Wolfe’s book for which he did extensive interviews with the astronauts, one says: The astronauts of the 1960s Mercury program felt their masculinity threatened by performing the same tasks as chimps. Read more: Almost 90% of astronauts have been men. Pilot Jerrie Cobb said she would take the place of one of the chimps if it meant having a shot at space. While the chimps were in training at the Holloman Airforce Base, women were actively excluded from spaceflight. “Ham” was an acronym for Holloman Aero Medical, but as American philosopher of science Donna Haraway has pointed out, “Ham’s name inevitably recalls Noah’s youngest and only black son”. Ham sits at an interesting intersection of race, gender and species. The National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington DC retains his bones. Ham’s flesh was stripped from his skeleton, cremated, and buried at the Space Hall of Fame in Almogordo, New Mexico. He died in 1983 at the age of 26.Ī proposal to stuff and display his body was abandoned after an outcry. In 1980 he was sent to another zoo to live with a group of chimps. People wrote him letters, and some were answered by zoo staff signed with Ham’s fingerprint. (Image credit: NASA)Īfter his flight, Ham lived for 20 years by himself, in a zoo in Washington DC. Ham clasps the hand of a member of the recovery team after exit from the capsule.
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