by Mary Roach
Newspaper databases typically have about five times as many Ham stories as Enos stories. “Enos didn’t have the charisma, and he wasn’t first,” says Fineg. Thus, John Glenn’s glory was little diluted by his simian predecessor. Also, Glenn managed to deflect the unkind comparisons by making the jokes himself. He told a congressional audience about the humbling experience of having been asked by President Kennedy’s young daughter Caroline, while her father stood by, “Where’s the monkey?”*
Enos was as unpopular as Ham was beloved. In news accounts, you could tell Fineg had applied himself to the task of finding positive ways to describe Enos. Rather than “obstinate” and “ornery,” terms he currently uses, Fineg referred to Enos as a “quiet, taciturn, pillar of the community type.”
“He was a mean one,” Fineg recalled when we spoke. Staff nicknamed him Enos the Penis. “Because he was just a son of a gun.”
“Meaning he was a dick.”
“Yeah.”
The nickname Enos the Penis is mentioned in the book Animals in Space, but the authors have an altogether different account of its genesis. They write that “Enos the Penis” derived from the chimp’s fondness for masturbating, and that NASA had inserted a balloon catheter in his penis during his orbit in part to discourage the habit. (Both Ham and Enos were to be filmed during their flights.) When the lever system malfunctioned, delivering shocks rather than banana pellets for correct responses, a frustrated Enos had yanked out the catheter and “began fondling himself in front of the camera.” Or so the story went.
I spent a few breathless days searching government archives for the X-rated Enos footage. I found footage of Ham in flight and Enos being readied for flight, but none of Enos inside the capsule pulling levers—his own or NASA’s. I contacted Fineg again.
“I don’t know where that came from,” he said. “I worked with Enos for a number of years, and never saw him do anything like that. His name was the result of his demeanor.”
“So the catheter didn’t have anything to do with keeping him from touching himself?” I don’t usually go in for euphemisms, but Fineg is a man who says “behind,” as in “I have a picture where he bit me in the behind.” The catheter, it turns out, was in the chimp’s femoral artery (to monitor blood pressure), not his urethra.
Still mildly unconvinced, I called Fineg’s colleague Bill Britz, who had been Ham’s vet but also worked with Enos.
“Naw,” said Britz. “I mean, most male chimps play with themselves. But he couldn’t even get to it.” Britz explained that the couch inside the capsule was designed with a barrier to keep the chimp from reaching down below the waist and pulling out the arterial catheter during the flight. Britz agreed with Fineg: Enos had no such reputation.
I contacted Chris Dubbs, one of the authors of Animals in Space, to find out where the story had come from. He forwarded an article his coauthor had found on the Web site of a Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydii. The Al-Ubaydii rendition included an arresting new detail: “During the ensuing press conference, Enos began by pulling his nappy down. NASA’s people were horrified of what might follow. Fortunately Enos had more class than this, and restrained himself.”
Dr. Al-Ubaydii, replying to an email, said he’d come upon the story in the 2007 book Space Race. In this version, Enos is less restrained: “As he pulled down his trousers, cameras clicked, flashing like diamonds, ensuring that Enos[’s] name would live in memory as much for his hobby as for his aeronautical achievements.” Inquiries to the author produced no reply, but a Google Books search unearthed another reference, this one in Dark Side of the Moon, published in 2006. “The next day at his post-flight press conference, he horrified his NASA handlers when he ripped off his diaper and started to fondle himself.” Dark Side cites yet another book on the Apollo race: James Schefter’s 1999 The Race.
“[Enos] would pull down his diaper in the middle of a training exercise and begin to masturbate. His handlers and medics figured that he’d stop if they inserted a catheter to drain off urine instead of using a condomlike device attached to a tube. It didn’t work…. They devised an advanced catheter with a small inflatable balloon to prevent its easy removal.” In those few lines, Schefter establishes himself as, in the words of one reviewer, a writer who “does not let facts get in the way of a good story.” The condom–tube device sounds like the urine collection device designed for Mercury astronauts to use during spaceflight. It was never used on chimps. And it is hard to imagine anyone going through the significant risk and hassle of catheterizing a chimpanzee just to keep him from playing with himself during training sessions. As for the balloon catheter, it was patented in 1963—two years after Enos’s flight—as a tool to remove blood clots, not to discourage chimpanzee masturbation. The Race has no sources or bibliography, and Schefter died in 2001.
What’s interesting is that Schefter never says Enos was masturbating during his spaceflight. He merely states that he pulled his catheter out. Nor did he claim that Enos fondled himself at the postflight press conference (which took place uneventfully at Kindley Air Force Base in Bermuda, not far from where Enos’s capsule was recovered). Schefter’s scene takes place back at Kennedy Space Center, not at a press conference but in front of a few reporters and NASA officials, as Enos descends the steps of the plane that brought him back from Bermuda. And he merely pulls his diaper down.
The story, as stories will, grew and mutated with each retelling, until Enos was having the world’s first orbital orgasm and then coming back down and brazenly masturbating in front of a sea of clicking cameras and exploding flashbulbs.
Here is the opening of the story the AP reporter filed after attending the infamous postsplashdown press conference in Bermuda. “Holding his first public audience since returning from outer space, the Holloman Air Force–trained chimpanaut refused Thursday to do even a cartwheel for newsmen at his press conference. ‘He’s really quite a cool guy and not the performing type at all,’ said Captain Jerry Fineg.”
Enos, your name is cleared.
A BLOW-DRYER wind has knocked over the flowers on Ham’s grave. I’m out here squinting in the noon sun, eating a sandwich and thawing out after a morning in the museum’s aggressively air-conditioned archives. Now I know the story behind the plaque. The same confusion that surrounded Ham while he was alive continued when he died. The International Space Hall of Fame was bombarded (their wording) by inquiries from the media and the public about the fate of his remains. It was something of a quandary. What’s appropriate protocol for a dead space chimp? Memorial service or incinerator?
The Air Force’s position was made clear in a draft of a letter by a Colonel William Cowan: Ham was a historical artifact. Cowan, repeatedly referring to Ham’s remains as “the carcass,” recommended that following the necropsy (the animal version of an autopsy), the skeleton be removed from the body and cleaned of flesh in the Smithsonian’s dermestid beetle colony and then sent to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology archives.
Ham’s hide had already been removed, in case the Smithsonian wished to prepare a taxidermied specimen. This seemed like a bad idea to me. I saw a photograph of Ham taken ten years after his flight. He had gained more than a hundred pounds over the course of his retirement and lost some of his teeth. Others protruded at unfetching angles. He was unrecognizable as the flight-suited, pink-faced youngster from the Life cover. He looked like Ernest Borgnine.
But no one asked my opinion. The Smithsonian announced plans to stuff Ham and add him to “the indoor Ham exhibit” at the International Space Hall of Fame, an exhibit that consisted at that time of “a photo of Ham.” The public went bonkers. The archives has a few of the letters. “Gentlemen: Ham is a national hero and not a thing…. Do you propose to stuff John Glenn as well?” “A chimpanzee is not a stuffed pepper.” Et cetera. The Washington Post, under the inevitable “The Wrong Stuff” headline, took the nation’s indignation a step further in an op-ed that insinuated Communist proclivities on the part of the Smithsonian. “The
only national heroes we can think of who are stuffed and on permanent display are V. I. Lenin and Mao Tse-tung.” (In keeping with the Communist proclivity for stuffing heroes, Soviet space dogs Belka and Strelka stand side by side in glass cases in Moscow’s Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, faces raised as though staring at the heavens or anticipating a treat.)
A follow-up announcement was quickly drafted. Ham would not be stuffed. He would be given “a hero’s burial” in a small plot in front of the Hall of Fame flagpoles, “similar to the final resting place of Smokey the Bear.”* What remained of Ham following a necropsy, a skeleton extraction, and the removal of his hide is difficult to imagine. Whatever it is, one has to assume, is what’s down there under the flowers.
The museum now had to come up with a suitable memorial service. They needed a respected public figure willing to say a few words about Ham’s contributions to manned space exploration in the United States. Clearly heat-struck, their public relations person sent off a letter to notable Ham detractor Alan Shepard. The letter pointed out that Shepard would enjoy “national attention from all areas of the media.” As though Alan Shepard, the first American man in space, wanted or needed media attention. In particular, at an event that would yet again have him sharing the spotlight with a chimp. The letter-writer acknowledged the “jokes and sometimes ‘unfunny’ humor about the situation.” The quotation marks were an ill-advised touch, seeming to suggest that the letter-writer herself found the jokes funny.
A reply arrived on letterhead from the Texas-based Coors distributorship where Shepard served as president, thanking the museum for the “thoughtful invitation” and expressing regrets. The letter was typed by Shepard’s secretary, initials JC. There was no signature. Undiscouraged, the Hall of Fame public relations staff next went after John Glenn, by this time not just an astronaut but a senator and a presidential candidate. Glenn politely declined, citing previous commitments.
A brief news story on the ceremony ran in the Albuquerque Journal. A photograph accompanying the article showed a loose crowd of maybe forty people standing around the flagpole area. “Colonel Stapp made a short speech and members of Girl Scout Troop 34 of Alamogordo laid a wreath on a small memorial plaque.” Stapp ran the crash sled research program at Holloman Air Force Base. In both aerospace and automotive safety studies, Holloman chimps were regularly used in impacts deemed too hazardous for airmen. Which made Stapp both an appropriate and inappropriate choice. He was intimately familiar with the heroic sacrifices of man’s closest cousin; he’d signed the paperwork on most of those sacrifices himself. The tribute was respectful, if short on sentiment*—one of those rare eulogies to incorporate numeric G force figures.
Enos had no memorial. A log book of Holloman chimp acquisitions† includes the note “remains at Smithsonian,” though no one there seems to know where he ended up. Animals in Space author Chris Dubbs spoke to someone whose mother had dissected Enos’s eyes to study the effects of cosmic radiation, but the man knew nothing about the rest of the chimp. This suggests that the body was parceled out for research. Which is the usual and appropriate fate of a research subject.
For better or worse, that’s what Ham and Enos were. They played a vital role in the country’s space efforts, but I would not use the term “heroes.” For the simple reason that no bravery was involved in what they did. A courageous feat is one undertaken with an understanding of the dangers involved. As far as Ham knew, January 31, 1961, was just another strange day in the little metal room. Alan Shepard may not have been using the expertise of a test pilot, but he was certainly using the guts. He let himself be strapped in a canister on the nose of a missile and blasted into space: an insanely dangerous feat undertaken by, at that point, only one other man.
The decision to put a chimpanzee in space before an astronaut was not, in either instance, an easy one. NASA had to weigh concern for the Mercury crew and lack of confidence in the hardware against the enormous pressure to best the Soviet Union. The early days of the Apollo program would be plagued with the same mixture of urgency and caution. Having watched the USSR rack up space firsts—first man-made satellite, first orbit of a live animal (Laika), first recovery of live animals (Belka and Strelka) from orbit, first man in space and in orbit, first spacewalk—the United States was ever more determined to reach the moon first. NASA was working furiously on President Kennedy’s publicly announced time line: By the end of the 1960s, America would put a man on the moon. Or anyway, something pretty close.
First U.S. Flag on Moon May Be Planted by Chimp
BETWEEN MAY 1962 and November 1963, veteran Associated Press reporter Harold R. Williams filed four stories based on visits to a new chimp facility at Holloman Aeromedical Research Laboratory. “Chimp College,” as he called it, was a million-dollar expansion of the grotty-looking facilities where Ham, Enos, and other chimps had lived and trained for the Mercury missions. It featured a staff of twenty-six, brand-new “dorms” with an outside run attached to each cage, a surgical suite, a kitchen, and a curriculum of “new, complicated and secret” tasks. Williams’s series ran in dozens of U.S. newspapers under various headlines like the one above, almost all of them highlighting the possibility of a lunar mission: “First from U.S. to Moon? Chimponauts* Hard at Work on Secret Space Program.” “Holloman Monk May Be First on Moon.” “Space Chimps’ College Grad May Hit Moon.”
Williams described college “Ph.D.” Bobby Joe as he sat at an instrument panel mock-up, effortlessly maneuvering a joystick to keep a crosshair centered inside a circle. “There is no question about it,” said Williams’s guide, a Major Herbert Reynolds, who would go on to become president of Baylor College of Medicine. “He could guide a space vehicle into space and bring it back.” On a different visit, Williams peered through the window of a “simulated space vehicle” at a chimp named Glenda. Glenda had been inside for three days, sleeping and working on the same shifts an astronaut would have. She had two days left to go.
Five days is what it took the Apollo 11 astronauts to reach the moon and plant the American flag. Was it true? Had NASA and the Air Force been planning to beat the Soviets to the moon by sending a trained chimpanzee on a one-way mission? A round trip was certainly out of the question. Lifting off from the moon and docking with an orbiter was beyond the capabilities of an ape. But a straightforward moon shot and capsule touchdown could be managed from the ground, just as unmanned rovers are landed remotely today.
The trickiest part would be finessing the public relations debacle of a dead chimpanzee hero. Best not to take a cue from the Soviet playbook. In November 1957, a mellow and patient Moscow street dog* named Laika, traveling suitless in a pressurized capsule, became the first living creature to orbit the home planet. Alas, there was no plan or means to bring her safely back down. For over a week, Soviet officials were mum on the topic, refusing to say whether Laika was still alive. They ignored inquiries from media and animal rights groups, until the clamor and outrage had all but eclipsed the glories of their achievement. Finally, nine days after the launch, Radio Moscow confirmed that Laika was dead. The particulars were left to speculation. In 1993, Laika’s trainer Oleg Gazenko told one of the authors of Animals in Space that she’d perished when a malfunction caused her capsule to overheat, just four hours into her flight.
Perhaps less scandalous to send a willing human. In 1962—the same year that Williams filed his Chimp College pieces—a story ran in a Sunday newspaper supplement called This Week suggesting that the USSR was considering sending a cosmonaut on a one-way lunar landing mission. That same year, according to space historian Dave Dooling, Missiles and Rockets, Aviation Week & Space Technology, and Aerospace Engineering all detailed a similar mission proposal making the rounds at NASA. The “one-way, one-man” lunar expedition was the brainchild of a pair of Bell Aerosystems engineers, John M. Cord and Leonard M. Seale. “It would be cheaper, faster, and perhaps the only way to beat the Russians,” Cord is quoted as saying. Dooling points out that intelligence data
gathered at that time suggested that the Soviets would be capable of landing a craft on the moon as early as 1965. (The United States landed on the moon in 1969.)
Neither the Soviet nor the American version proposed leaving the sad spaceman to die on the moon. Someone would come pick him up in one to three years—just as soon as they figured out how to do it and built the hardware. A total of nine launches would follow his own, delivering a living module, communications module and equipment, construction equipment to build the modules, plus the 9,910 pounds of food, water, and oxygen he was projected to consume while waiting around for his ride.
And who would agree to go? “It is sincerely believed,” wrote Cord and Seale, “that capable and qualified people could be found to volunteer for the mission even if the return possibilities were nil.” I believe it. There are astronauts today who happily would sign on for a one-way mission to Mars. This scenario holds no eventual return trip. Rather, the crew would live out the rest of their lives with help from unmanned resupply landers. “I’ve spent my life training to go into space,” astronaut Bonnie Dunbar told New Yorker writer Jerome Groopman. “If my life ends on a Mars mission, that’s not a bad way to go.” Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, said in a 2007 interview that reaching Mars was the dream of the early cosmonauts and that she would love, at seventy-two, to realize that dream: “I am ready to fly without coming back.” Though years or decades of resupply launches might not be cheaper or easier than figuring out the technology to make fuel for the ascent engines out of Martian resources. Or putting fuel and hardware for the return trip onto those unmanned landers, instead of survival supplies.
