Few human children have been treated with more cautious care. Dressed by a team of tender technicians, the little chimpanzee was togged out in spotless diaper and nylon mesh space suit, then zippered into a fitted contour couch that looked like a cradle trimmed with electronics. After two hours of fussing, Enos. the 5½-year-old chimponaut, was ready to ride the first passenger-carrying orbital flight of U.S. Project Mercury. His cradle was fitted into a Mercury capsule on the nose of an Atlas rocket.
The high ride was scheduled for 7:30 a.m., but it was held up for a while because of minor troubles with the capsule's telemetry system. Enos, who is called by his trainers "a meditative chimp," did not seem to mind. Snug in his air-conditioned nest, he waited patiently. At 10:07, the Atlas roared off its pad, climbed above Cape Canaveral and arced toward the northeast. It curved into orbit about 100 miles up.
By 10:38, the capsule and rocket had separated, and Enos was over Zanzibar. The Zanzibar tracking station reported: "He hasn't missed a trick yet." Neither the acceleration of the roaring ascent nor weightlessness in orbit seemed to bother the meditative chimp. When colored lights appeared in little windows above his couch, he pressed the levers which, as he had been taught, would keep him from suffering mild electric shocks. Over Australia and over the Pacific, the lights appeared as scheduled, and Enos, performing properly, got no shocks. He was reported by Mexico at 11:34 and by Canaveral at 11:41. He completed his first orbit in one hour, 28.5 min. His heartbeat (105-120), respiration (20-25) and temperature (98°) were considered normal. So far the flight was perfect.
Banana Flavor. The plan was to allow Enos to orbit the earth three times before parachuting the capsule into the Atlantic. But in case of trouble, ships and planes had been deployed in eight widely separated landing places. As the capsule soared over Africa for the second time, everything was normal. While it was crossing the Indian Ocean, Enos was doing minor tasks that earned him sips of water and ten small, banana-flavored pellets, which were delivered mechanically when he pushed the proper levers. But as the capsule approached Australia, the monitor station at Muchea on the west coast noted that it was not maintaining its proper attitude. Instead of pointing its blunt forward end steadily 34 degrees above the horizontal, it was veering erratically. The stations at Woomera, in south-central Australia, and at Hawaii, confirmed Muchea's report. Apparently one of the hydrogen-peroxide jets that controlled the capsule's attitude in space had failed to close.
The failure was serious because the retrorockets that are fired to slow the capsule and bring it down from orbit cannot do their job unless they are pointed in the proper direction. One of the Soviet dog-carrying satellites came to grief for just this reason. Instead of curving the satellite to earth, its retrorockets shot it into a higher orbit.