The image to the left is not a primate astronaut from “Planet of the Apes.” It is, in fact, a real space monkey. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the first flight into space of a living being that survived the expedition. On May 28th, 1959, one rhesus monkey, named Able, and one squirrel monkey named Miss Baker became the first “astronauts” to survive a return flight into space.
Though they were not the first animals launched into space, Able and Baker helped pave the way for human spaceflight by showing that animals can indeed survive the rigorous launch and return of a spacecraft. Their vital signs were monitored during the mission, giving scientists a better understanding of what stresses spaceflight puts on a living body.
Launched aboard a Jupiter AM-18 rocket, Able and Baker flew to a height of 360 miles and traveled 1700 miles from their launch site at the Eastern Space Missile Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Their capsule landed in the ocean, and was retrieved by a U.S. Navy vessel commanded by Joseph Guion.
Guion told NASA, “As soon as I picked it up out of the water, it was flying all over the place. The ship was rolling and the nose cone swung back and forth. And I was just hoping that nobody would get hurt…We still didn’t know if the monkeys were alive ‘cause we didn’t have the telemetry. And so one technician ran up to the back end of it and plugged in and he says, ‘They’re alive!’ So everybody went ‘Yay!’ And that’s when I could finally say, ‘Ah!’ Relax.”
The entire flight lasted about 15 minutes, and during nine minutes of that the two tiny astronauts experienced weightlessness. After the recovery of their capsule, the monkeys were allowed to relax in an air-conditioned room aboard the vessel, then escorted to Washington, D.C. for a press conference.
To see a video of Able and Miss Baker getting ready for flight, check out this video on Youtube: Able and Baker blast off, from Universal News 1959.
Able died, unfortunately, a few short days after the flight. She needed an operation to remove an infected medical electrode, and had an adverse reaction to the anesthetic. Miss Baker, however, survived another 25 years, living at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. During the rest of her life, she would receive over 100 letters a day from children who read about her adventures in textbooks and wanted to say ‘Hello’.
Miss Baker’s contribution was far from forgotten at the time of her death, and at her funeral in 1984 the attendance was well over 300 people. She still has a grave marker (pictured below) in front of the Alabama Rocket Center memorializing her part in the history of spaceflight.
Miss Baker's memorial. Image Credit:DCmemorials.com
Able and Baker were preceded by a long line of unsuccessful attempts by the U.S. to launch primates into space. The first attempt was Albert, who flew to 39 miles (63km) on June 11, 1948 aboard a V2 rocket, but died of suffocation during the flight. Albert II actually made it into space (above 62 miles/100km) on June 14th, 1949, but died upon the impact of his re-entry flight.
Primates were far from the first living things sent intentionally into space. That distinction belongs to a member of a different part of the animal kingdom: fruit flies. Fruit flies were sent into space, along with a sample of corn seeds, in 1947 to test the effects of radiation at high altitude.
So, to celebrate this historic event in spaceflight, it may be fitting to eat a banana for breakfast (or lunch, or dinner, or all three).
Work at the institute was instrumental in the creation of a Soviet polio vaccine, and its scientists worked on all the major diseases of the 20th century
Stalin's space monkeys It looks like a neglected zoo. But the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy has its own macabre chapter in the history of the Soviet Union. Shaun Walker reports from Sukhumi, Abkhazia
From the old railway station, now a hollow shell covered in weeds, a long concrete stairway, sheltered by sub-tropical foliage, winds from the centre of Sukhumi up to a collection of buildings, many pocked with bullet holes or crushed by bombs.
The first thing that registers is the putrid smell of animal faeces, then from inside one building comes a primeval squawking that sounds like a child being tortured. Cage after cage of distraught-looking monkeys come into view, nearly 300 in all, gnawing at mandarins and scampering around their enclosures.
This is what remains of the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy, the first primate testing centre in the world, and possibly the site of a macabre Stalinist experiment to breed a human-ape hybrid. Set amid palm trees and lush greenery on a hill just outside the centre of Sukhumi, it was once the envy of the West. Its behavioural and medical experiments set it at the forefront of groundbreaking medical discoveries, and trained monkeys for space travel.
But the years of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, then the Georgian-Abkhaz war, took a heavy toll on the centre. Most of its scientists left to set up a new centre in Russia, along with most of the monkeys that were not killed. What is left today is a disturbing shadow of the institute's former glory.
Legend has it that the institute, which opened in 1927, was born of a secret Soviet plan to create a man-ape hybrid that would become a Soviet superman and propel the Soviet Union ahead of the West. The Soviet elite, goes the apocryphal tale that has appeared widely in Russian media, wanted to create a prototype worker that would be inhumanly strong and mentally dulled, to carry out the gruelling work of industrialising the vast expanses of newly Sovietised territory.
Scientists at the institute today admit that these experiments did go on at the institute, though they deny it was part of any overarching plan for the creation of a new race. The tests were performed by Ilya Ivanov, an eminent Russian biologist who had also collaborated with the Pasteur Institute in Paris. About the turn of the century he had perfected the technique of artificially inseminating mares, and had also produced cross-breeds between various different species. Then, Europe was alive with ideas of eugenics, and the Soviets were out to prove once and for all that Darwinism had superseded religion.
"Professor Ivanov started these experiments in Africa and continued them here in Sukhumi," says Vladimir Barkaya, who started at the institute in 1961 and is now scientific director. "He took sperm from human males and injected it into female chimpanzees, although nothing came of it." Professor Barkaya denies monkey sperm was used on human females, although letters were apparently received by the institution by people of both sexes offering to participate in the experiments.
In time, the institute evolved from science fiction to evidence-based practice. Work at the institute was instrumental in the creation of a Soviet polio vaccine, and its scientists worked on all the major diseases of the 20th century.
One man's name is synonymous with the centre. Boris Lapin was born in 1921 and after a heroic turn in the Second World War, started work at the Sukhumi monkey colony in 1949. In 1959 he was appointed director of the institute, and ran it up until 1992, when during the Abkhaz-Georgian war he fled along with the majority of employees and monkeys across the border to Russia. Despite being in his late eighties, he still runs the institute set up at Adler in Russia.
"My biggest achievement over all this time is that we were able to build the institute up from scratch again," he says, from his Adler office, plastered with photographs of famous visitors to the Sukhumi institute over the years, from Nikita Khrushchev to Ho Chi Minh.
In the 1950s, as Professor Lapin was taking over, word got out to the rest of the world about the uses to which monkeys were being put at Sukhumi. "At the time of Sputnik, there was a huge amount of curiosity in the West about what else the Soviets might have up their sleeves in the fields of science and technology," says Douglas Bowden, an American primatologist who has co-operated with the Sukhumi, then Adler centres since 1962. An expert commission headed by President Dwight Eisenhower's personal doctor went to the Soviet Union in 1957 and visited Sukhumi. "They were so impressed with what they found there that when they came back to the US they recommended to Eisenhower that a similar institute should be set up in the US." In the end, seven centres were set up in the US.
As time went on, the centre also became closely involved with the Soviet space programme, training six monkeys to send into space. "We had to make sure they were intelligent monkeys to perform all their duties in space," Professor Lapin says. "Not every monkey was capable of that sort of thing." After the monkeys blasted off, the centre's employees would watch them on television at Sukhumi.
Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was a disaster for scientists across the vast empire. They went from the pride of the country to being neglected and unfunded. "They were terrible times," says Professor Barkaya. "Many monkeys died, and many people too. We had nothing to feed the monkeys with, and there was no electricity or heating. Many of them simply froze to death."
Violeta Agrba, who was the acting director of the institute during the war, while Professor Lapin was arranging the transfer to Adler, says: "I remember walking around the cages in the winter of 1992, during the war, and seeing a baboon shivering in his cage. It was so sad. But even though we couldn't do any medical work, and there was a war on, we all came to work every day." Professor Agrba once found an unexploded shell on the conference table in her office. There was a huge hole in the ceiling.
The centre also had 1,000 monkeys that lived freely in a special zone in the mountains in the south of Abkhazia, where they were monitored and their behaviour studied. When the war started, many died in the crossfire; some were stolen by troops and used as mascots. "Some are still alive," Professor Agrba says. "But after everything that happened in the war, they are so scared of people they don't approach anyone. We need to do a helicopter survey and find the remaining ones, but there's no money for that."
Today, the centre at Sukhumi, where a few staff who refused to leave during the war have bravely remained and tried to resurrect their scientific work, is struggling to get back on its feet. A German scientist who worked with the institute before the war and took pity on their situation ships them medicines and equipment each year. But most of the best employees went to Alder, and the monkeys seem to have nothing to eat except mandarins.
"The level we had before is very difficult to attain now," Professor Barkaya says. "But while we used to write to people asking to co-operate with them, now they're again coming to us. We had an interesting proposition from St Petersburg, from a company that has produced medicine to reduce blindness in old people. They've tested it on dogs and horses and now they want to test it on monkeys."
The Adler centre in much better shape, with all the most modern equipment and is still at the forefront of medicine, working on stem-cell research and birdflu vaccines, and testing the effects of radiation on monkeys in preparation for a manned flight to Mars. "We've discovered that their immune systems are severely weakened by the radiation given off by solar flares," says Professor Agrba. "Now we need to see how serious this is and how long it lasts."
But even at Adler, the financial situation isn't easy. "One girl used to work here as a lab assistant and got paid 3,000 roubles (£65) a month," Professor Agrba says. "She left to work selling blankets in the market and now she makes 15,000 roubles (£325)."
Obtaining new monkeys is almost impossible now, with most countries banning their export. The days when Professor Lapin and colleagues would simply fly to Nigeria and spend weeks negotiating with tribes for the purchase of monkeys, as happened in the 1960s, are long gone. The Adler institute has a breeding programme, which ensures that its population of 3,700 monkeys is refreshed each year. But for Sukhumi, with just 286 monkeys, inbreeding is a serious problem.
The staff at both centres is split between dignified octogenarians with decades of scientific experience, and budding young scientists. The middle ground is missing. "It's a problem across the former Soviet Union," Professor Barkaya says. "The generation of scientists who came of age during perestroika went into business. Now there is again an interest in science, and it's left to us to pass on our knowledge as best we can to the younger generation to ensure the good work continues."
Ethical concerns that would undoubtedly surround such ventures in Europe are absent both in Abkhazia and in Russia. Neither institute has any security; the thought of animal rights protesters attacking does not even occur to the scientists.
"Of course, we're aware of the ethical difficulties," says Professor Lapin. "But in some cases monkeys are the only animals we can use. Thalidomide was tested on mice and other animals but not on monkeys, and you remember what happened there."
Re:Space Monkeys
« Reply #4 on: 2009-05-31 15:55:08 »
Howdy again, all! I haven't abandoned this at all. Space Monkeys has been a long time cause of mine in the Church of Virus. Conceptually I put it this way.
1) Humans have too many ethical conundrums about genetically engineering other humans. Certainly conflicts over human cloning only portend many more as we approach this holy grail.
2) Sending humans into space, certainly to destinations external to Earth orbits, is simply not cost effective. At this point robotic probes are more cost effective. Other earthly species are very likely already better adapted for zero-g space flight, and would likely make a more useful biological platform from which to engineer even more efficient/intelligent space travelers. So if we are ever to actually "be there" in outer space, it will likely be through a surrogate/domesticated species.
While we shouldn't rule out any potentially useful species in this regard, I expect for the sake of our memes and cultural vanities we will want a species somewhat related to humans in a way that they could understand our experiences.
3) and so I've suggested space monkeys . . . probably a mammalian based species already possessing significant social intelligence similar to humans. Especially in light of the lastest candidate for missing lemur/human link, I'm open to lemurs. Personally I've settled on baboons because they have the largest social groupings second only to humans in the primate family. But I see no reason to suppose that other primates with more efficient physical proportions couldn't be socially augmented to human standards either through genetic engineering, and/or computerized social technologies.
Re:Space Monkeys
« Reply #5 on: 2009-06-01 02:27:07 »
Mo: Quote:
...I'm open to lemurs. Personally I've settled on baboons because they have the largest social groupings second only to humans in the primate family. But I see no reason to suppose that other primates with more efficient physical proportions couldn't be socially augmented to human standards either through genetic engineering, and/or computerized social technologies.
[letheomaniac] It occurs to me that perhaps Spider Monkeys are naturally rather well equipped for a zero-g environment, being in possesion of the most marvelously prehensile tail I have ever seen - what amounts to an additional appendage would come in rather er, handy when clambering about in a spacecraft.
Re:Space Monkeys
« Reply #6 on: 2009-06-01 03:26:40 »
Humans do a better job than monkeys, and this is unlikely to change in the next 50 years although computers may outperform us, and potentially make us irrelevant, long before then. Simultaneously, if we don't have $1kg/orbit by 2050 which would invalidate Mo's argument, then it is likely that humanity does not have any significant future.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Howdy again, all! I haven't abandoned this at all. Space Monkeys has been a long time cause of mine in the Church of Virus. Conceptually I put it this way.
1) Humans have too many ethical conundrums about genetically engineering other humans. Certainly conflicts over human cloning only portend many more as we approach this holy grail.
2) Sending humans into space, certainly to destinations external to Earth orbits, is simply not cost effective. At this point robotic probes are more cost effective. Other earthly species are very likely already better adapted for zero-g space flight, and would likely make a more useful biological platform from which to engineer even more efficient/intelligent space travelers. So if we are ever to actually "be there" in outer space, it will likely be through a surrogate/domesticated species.
While we shouldn't rule out any potentially useful species in this regard, I expect for the sake of our memes and cultural vanities we will want a species somewhat related to humans in a way that they could understand our experiences.
3) and so I've suggested space monkeys . . . probably a mammalian based species already possessing significant social intelligence similar to humans. Especially in light of the lastest candidate for missing lemur/human link, I'm open to lemurs. Personally I've settled on baboons because they have the largest social groupings second only to humans in the primate family. But I see no reason to suppose that other primates with more efficient physical proportions couldn't be socially augmented to human standards either through genetic engineering, and/or computerized social technologies.
Re:Space Monkeys
« Reply #8 on: 2009-06-02 19:30:00 »
Quote:
I'd go with Bonobos. A much more sexually adventuresome predecessor Walter
Okey .... 'Uncle' ....not to in any way to suggest "sexually adventuresome predecessor" is a bad thing, I mean geewiz a quick look in the mirror affirms that for me as good, but the link to shooting Chimps into space I'm missing
Re:Space Monkeys
« Reply #9 on: 2009-06-02 22:18:44 »
Right, well, as they are now, non-human primates/lemurs aren't as good as humans, but I think they have more promise than humans. I'm inclinded towards smaller models because they require less space. I'd also prefer higher sociality which would probably require fewer neural enhancements and technological accessories to successfully access and understand human memespace. Chimps are interesting to us because we are most closely related to them, but on the previous two criteria there are many better models than the chimp.
Enhanced chimps would only be a slight improvement over humans. Baboons are actually the most social mammals (largest in-groups) outside the human species, so I think whenever they acquire language their sociality would more likely serve enough incentive to achieve human communication capacity. The problem with chimps, though its been shown that they can acquire some sign language capacity, they never progress much further. Once they can communicate with their handlers they seem to lack that kind of chattering and curious sociality that drives human toddlers to immerse themselves in language. And of course for size, chimps are only a little bit smaller than humans.
As for shooting monkeys into space, its not entirely about space travel, but also biological experimentation into extreme genetic engineering which might be difficult to perform on humans given our ethical issues. We may get over that one day, but I say why wait? We can start with non-human animals and the end product will likely be more adapted to space than humans are now. Since we likely have a lot of time on our hands until humans can feasibly become independent of Earth, its as good an experiment as any in the meantime which could concievably advance such goals. Even if it goes nowhere, we'll learn a lot about genetic engineering on species more like ourselves.
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