Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Monkeys in Space

November 29th 1961 NASA launches a chimpanzee named Enos into Earth orbit. Enos was not the first animal in space but he was the first to orbit and return successfully to earth. Although Enos was blissfully unaware of the circumstances which catapulted him into the great beyond, his journey was part of a complex struggle between the world’s greatest super powers. By 1961 the space race had become an integral part of the Cold War. More than the nuclear arms race the formation of the Soviet and American space programs, would reshape not only peoples’ views of themselves as citizens of each state, but their understanding of their place in the greater cosmos. The space race would captive the attention of the world for more than a half a century, and affect generations born long after disarmament.

The launch of Sputnik on October 4th 1957, and the Soviet head start in the space race provoked panic among U.S. citizens and politicians. Just a month later Sputnik 2 blasted into orbit with a dog named Laika aboard. In 1958 NASA was formed, as Americans began to question the social and educational underpinnings of their nation. According to NASA’s website “chances for a manned orbital mission in 1961 now were dim.” Earlier the same year Soviets had successfully rocketed Yuri Gagarin into space, where he had became the first man to orbit the earth. Falling behind the Soviet space program NASA desperately needed Enos’s mission to be successful. Despite numerous technical difficulties and a malfunctioning thruster, which forced controllers to return Enos and Mecury Atlas to earth prematurely, “MA-5 had to be termed an excellent operation, one that had achieved most of its objectives and that would become a milestone on the road into the unknown.” Most importantly Enos’s “mission concluded the testing for a human orbital flight, achieved by John Glenn on February 20th, 1962.”

Enos excursion into space, as well as that of many other animals, paved the way for human exploration. It is important to remember that before the men aboard the Apollo XI made their “great leap for mankind,” our homogeneous relative leapt first. Now in the after math of the Cold War the collective accomplishments of the U.S., Russia, and other nations have made the International Space Station and other joint ventures possible. International cooperation and exploration of space is sure to further our understanding of the universe and the planet that we and our animal counterparts co-habitat, for centuries to come.

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