They sent a chimpanzee today. His name is Ham, and he went to space and came back, and the whole thing worked.

I’m not being dismissive — this is genuinely important. Ham flew a Mercury capsule on a Redstone rocket to an altitude of about 157 miles, experienced several minutes of weightlessness, performed the tasks he was trained to do (pushing levers in response to light signals), and splashed down in the Atlantic. He was in the capsule for about 16 minutes of total flight time, about 6.5 of that in actual space. He came back alive and apparently in reasonable health, though there was some trouble with a pressure suit overinflation that gave him a bruised nose.

The fact that he performed his tasks correctly during the flight is important. One of the unknowns about human spaceflight has been whether the cognitive and motor functions we rely on actually work in weightlessness. Ham’s performance suggests they do. A chimpanzee operating a lever-response task correctly under zero-g conditions doesn’t prove a human pilot can fly a spacecraft, but it’s a meaningful data point.

Ham was apparently in good spirits after recovery, which is wonderful. The photographs of him grinning in his little couch after splashdown are irresistible. He reportedly bit one of the recovery personnel, which I think is entirely understandable given what he’d just been through.

Betty wanted to know if they’d give him a medal, which I said was unlikely but not impossible given how the military works. She has strong feelings about the chimpanzees and other animals used in testing. I told her the data they’re getting from Ham will help make sure Alan Shepard comes back alive, and she accepted that, though she reserved the right to continue feeling bad about it.

The engineers at NASA are reviewing the flight data now. There was a concern about the cutoff for the rocket being slightly off — it went a bit faster and higher than planned, which meant Ham experienced higher G forces on re-entry than intended. The capsule also came down somewhat off target. These are things to fix before you put a man in there.

But the fundamental question — can a living thing go into space in a Mercury capsule and come back functional? — has now been answered. Yes. Ham did it.

We should be next. The Soviets are clearly working toward their own human spaceflight. I keep reading rumors and speculation about what they’re preparing. The next few months feel urgent.

Ham is currently at a Washington zoo, apparently healthy and enjoying whatever chimpanzees enjoy. He will be a historical figure for as long as there are records, which is a strange fate for a chimp who just wanted the levers to behave correctly.

Good work, Ham.