SPACE: Little Old Reliable

Space pioneer of the week: a male Latin American squirrel monkey. Strapped into a rubber-padded chamber in the nose cone of a Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missile, the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed beast, Little Old Reliable by name, made space-research history as the first higher mammal to travel hundreds of miles into space, where only a Russian dog and U.S. mice had gone before. Purpose of the test: to gather data on how a human might fare in space flight. Reasons for picking a squirrel monkey: small size—Little Old Reliable weighed less than 1 lb.—and...