The Jupiter take-off from Cape Canaveral last week was routine. The fat, 60-ft. IRBM rose from its pad, climbed through thin clouds, curved toward the southeast and vanished among the stars. No one was surprised; of the 20 Army Jupiters fired so far, only one has failed.
But in the roomy nose cone rode an extraordinary cargo: two young female monkeys, Able and Baker.* Monkey Able, a greyish, 6-lb. rhesus, was a graduate of a school at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington. D.C., where she and her classmates were taught to press a lever when a red light flashed. If the lever went unpressed, the monkeys got electric shocks in their furry behinds. Monkey Able was also conditioned to being strapped into a capsule, to wearing a miniature helmet and tolerating noise, vibration and the indignities attendant to the attaching of instruments to her body.
Contour Couch. Inside the nose cone, Monkey Able was dressed in a space suit and strapped to a carefully shaped contour couch of fiber-glass plastic. She wore gauze and charcoal diapers for daintiness. Since the g-forces of launching are much less (15 g) than those of hitting the atmosphere (38 g). she was suspended face down so that the bed would support her when the nose cone plunged back toward the earth. The capsule, a 250-lb. cylinder 41 in. long and 18 in. in diameter, contained a heating and cooling system and provided a change of air every 30 seconds. Before Abie's eyes was the light that would flash red. and close to her skinny fingers was the button that she had been trained to push. Monkey Baker, a graduate of the Naval Aviation School of Medicine at Pensacola, was a fluffy South American squirrel-monkey weighing only 11 oz. Wearing a tiny helmet, she rode in a smaller cylindrical capsule and lay on a molded bed of silicone rubber covered for her comfort with a thin mattress of rubber foam.
To test the effects of radiation, the nose cone carried tubes containing living onion tissue, yeast cells, corn and mustard seeds, fruit flies, human blood (the donor: Captain William Augerson of the surgeon general's office), and the eggs and sperm of sea urchins. Some of the eggs and sperm were arranged to be mixed during the flight, causing the first conception of earthly life in space for the later study of earth-bound scientists.
Telemetered Symptoms. As the Jupiter with its living cargo soared off, its transmitters radioed back a sheaf of telemetered information. Fourteen electronic channels reported the symptoms of Monkey Able, including her muscular reactions, heart sounds, temperature and respiration. There were only two failures: her electrocardiograph failed to work; at the last minute, the button that she was supposed to push had been disconnected before launch because the scientists found that it interfered electrically with other apparatus.
As medical men intently watched the graphs. Abie's pulse quickened from a normal 140 beats per second to 175 during acceleration. But for Abie's nine long minutes of weightlessness, her pulse was normal and steady. Under the 38-g stress of reentry, it rose to 222—high, but within acceptable bounds.
After 14 minutes Cape Canaveral lost radio touch. The nose cone was plunging into the atmosphere at the end of its flight, and as usual the hot trail of ionized air that re-entry produces blocked off radio waves.