'She was very prominent in the story of our early spaceflight ventures.' Children read about her in textbooks and wanted to say hello. 'She would get 100 to 150 letters a day from schoolchildren,' says Ed Buckbee, a former director of the center. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. Her stuffed body is on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.īut Baker lived another 25 years, mostly at the U.S. Unfortunately, Able died just a few days later, during a medical procedure to remove an electrode. Later, they were flown to Washington, D.C., under military escort, for the press conference.

The two monkeys were taken to the officer's wardroom, where air conditioning had been installed for their comfort. 'It was about the size of a large thermos bottle,' he says, recalling that Baker was 'extremely easy to talk to and hold. Guion says he was floored to see how tiny Baker's capsule was. Military personnel on the ship checked on the monkeys and then sent out a message: 'Able Baker perfect. But then a lookout spotted the nose cone bobbing in the water, and they struggled to get it on board. He and his crew at first thought it had sunk. It just came down very rapidly and - boom - it was gone.' 'The nose cone arced down, almost like a shooting star, down toward the water. 'You could read a newspaper on the bridge of the ship, it was so bright,' he says. The bright missile lit up the dark sky, says Joseph Guion, who commanded the Navy vessel USS Kiowa that retrieved the monkeys. The monkeys' missile blasted off in the early morning hours from Cape Canaveral and traveled 1,700 miles in 16 minutes, reaching an altitude of about 360 miles. officials stressed that Able had been born not in India, but in Independence, Kan. 'Americans were aware of this,' Dubbs says, 'and the space race was clearly on by the time that Able and Baker came on the scene.'Īble was a rhesus monkey, and Baker was a much smaller squirrel monkey.īecause the rhesus monkey is revered by some in India, U.S. The first animal who actually orbited the planet was a dog named Laika, though she did not survive the entire flight. At least 30 of those animals returned alive. Meanwhile, the Soviets were sending up dogs and having success bringing them back alive from suborbital flights, Dubbs says. One monkey mission saw the animals return home safely, but their vehicle hadn't traveled high enough for them to actually reach space. After another parachute failure, a monkey plummeted into the sea and was never recovered.

Another monkey died on impact when its parachute failed. For over a decade, all monkey flights failed for one reason or another, Dubbs says. 'And then they started sending monkeys.'Īmerica's first attempt to send up a monkey was in 1948. In 1947, the United States sent up fruit flies, which were the first living things to travel into space, Dubbs says. They munched peanuts and crackers.'Īble and Baker were not the first living creatures to return to Earth alive from space, although that myth seems to be out there, says Chris Dubbs, co-author of the book Animals in Space: From Research Rockets to the Space Shuttle. Meanwhile, the newspaper noted, 'the monkeys were far less excited than the humans. The monkeys appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and at a press conference, news correspondents 'pushed each other and clambered over chairs to get closer,' reported The New York Times.

Their safe return occurred two years before any humans flew into space, and it made them huge celebrities. May 28, 1959.'įifty years ago, when Baker made her famous flight, she had some company in the nose cone of the Jupiter ballistic missile: a rhesus monkey named Able.Īble and Baker were shot about 360 miles up into space and experienced about nine minutes of weightlessness. The gravestone reads: 'Miss Baker, squirrel monkey, first U.S. In Huntsville, Ala., there is an unusual grave site where, instead of flowers, people sometimes leave bananas.

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