Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

8. ONE FURRY STEP FOR MANKIND The Strange Careers of Ham and Enos

The John P. Stapp Air and Space Park is made entirely of things that can hurt you. Eleven historical missiles are displayed amid plantings of spiny desert succulents. You walk along the gravel pathways, reading the little signs: PRICKLY PEAR, LITTLE JOE, CRIMSON HEDGEHOG. From the names alone, it is sometimes hard to know which is which. Is TURKS HEAD a cactus or an exploding munition? A similar sort of confusion can be found 25 yards down the hill, at the base of the flagpoles that mark the entrance to the park and the adjoining New Mexico Museum of Space History and International Space Hall of Fame. Flush to the pavement is a bronze grave marker that says, WORLD’S FIRST ASTROCHIMP HAM.[41] The astrochimps were a knotty chimera. People weren’t sure how to think of them. Chimps or astronauts? Research animals or national heroes? They’re still not. Someone has left a basket of flowers on the grave, and someone else has left a plastic banana.

You can’t blame people for being confused. The careers of Ham and Enos—the chimpanzees who, in 1961, flew the dress rehearsals for the first U.S. suborbital (January) and orbital (November) flights were in some respects not all that far off from the careers of Alan Shepard and John Glenn. The chimps and the two astronauts who followed them into space did not train together, but they could have. They spent time in the same altitude chambers and tried out weightlessness on board the same parabolic airplane flights, rode the same spinning centrifuges and vibration tables to get used to the noise and shudder and G’s of liftoff. Come the big day, astrochimp and astronaut would suit up and ride out to the gantry in the same Airstream trailer.

For both species, piloting duties were light to nonexistent. Mercury capsules, as Ham’s veterinarian Bill Britz says, “were not flying machines, they were bullets.” Shoot them up, cue the parachutes, watch them come back down.[42] Speaking of both man and chimp, Britz said, “They were organisms placed on board.” The science of the Mercury program was an extension of the V-2 and Aerobee and parabolic flights that led up to it. Aerospace biologists had established that humans can function for a few seconds without gravity. But what about an hour, a day, a week? “People ask, Why?” says Britz of the era of the spacefaring chimp. “Mary, we just didn’t know.” What were the longer-term effects of space travel—not only of weightlessness, but of cosmic radiation? (High-energy atomic particles have been zinging through space at ferocious speeds since the Big Bang. Earth’s magnetic field protects us by deflecting cosmic rays, but in space, these invisible bullets smash unimpeded through cells, causing mutations. It’s serious enough that astronauts are classified as radiation workers.)

Just as the Alberts laid the groundwork for the Mercury fliers, Ham and Shepard and the rest would pave the way for the Gemini astronauts. And on it went. Gemini paving the way for Apollo. Six-month space station missions paving the way for the eventual long haul to Mars. Each space program along the way provides opportunities for planetary science, but in the grander scheme of space exploration, every program is fundamentally practice and prep for longer, farther trips to come.

Zero gravity still had NASA spooked. “The big bugaboo was weightlessness,” said John Glenn in a 1967 Associated Press interview. “Many ophthalmologists thought the eye would change its shape and that this would change the vision, so that maybe the man in space would not be able to see at all.” That is why, if you’d looked inside Glenn’s capsule, you’d have seen a scaled-down version of the classic Snellen eye chart taped to the instrument panel. Glenn had been given instructions to read the chart every twenty minutes. A color blindness test and a device to measure astigmatism were also on board. I used to hear about Glenn’s historic flight and think, “Man, what was that like—being the first NASA astronaut to orbit the Earth?” Now I know. It was like visiting the eye doctor.

An overabundance of gravity—the multiple G’s of launch and reentry—also had NASA concerned. An astronaut needed to be able to reach the instrument panel in case something went wrong. If his outstretched arm weighed 70 pounds instead of 9, would he have the strength to raise it? This is why Ham (and later Enos) spent weeks learning a routine that would have them reaching over to an instrument panel and pulling levers throughout their flights. The lever-pulling also let researchers keep track of any cognitive ebbs during the chimps’ flights. They wanted to be sure that zero gravity, combined with some yet-to-be-discovered X factor, wouldn’t disorient a space flyer or slow his reaction time.

Given that the Mercury fliers were gold-standard, swinging-dick military test pilots, the concern did not sit well. These men hadn’t been in space, but they’d spent enough time on the doorstep to feel confident they’d be fine. As test pilots, they’d endured G forces during climbs and pullouts that were higher and more sustained than any they’d have to deal with on a Mercury flight. They didn’t worry about their abilities; they worried, if anything, about their ride. As of two months before launch, the guidance system of the Redstone rocket that would carry Shepard’s capsule into space had been misbehaving, and there were seven last-minute modifications to the hardware that hadn’t been tested in flight. That’s another reason NASA sent chimpanzees up first. (They would come to regret the caution. Three weeks before Alan Shepard launched, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.)

Ham’s flight implied—in a widely publicized manner—that the astronaut, America’s hero, was no more than a glorified chimp. “To be preceded by a chimpanzee was just a blow to their ego,” Bill Britz told me. The astronauts would surely have preferred another quiet dummy launch. In the months prior to Ham’s flight, a capsule was launched carrying a “crewman simulator”[43] that “breathed,” consuming oxygen and producing carbon dioxide to test the cabin sensors. The same insinuations could be made about a man whose job could be done by a dummy, but the press didn’t cover dummy flights the way they covered chimp flights. The banana pellet dispenser was gone when Shepard and Glenn climbed on board, but the stigma remained. As fighter jock Chuck Yeager, the rightest of stuff, famously put it, “I wouldn’t want to have to sweep monkey shit off the seat before I climbed into the capsule.”

Though Ham and Enos and their alternates lived and trained in trailers alongside the astronauts’ live-work quarters at Kennedy Space Center’s famous Hangar S, Britz says he can’t recall talking to Alan Shepard more than once or twice. “We didn’t mingle much.” Enos’s veterinarian Jerry Fineg agrees: “They didn’t want to recognize the fact that we were there.” Chimp jokes were poorly received. Britz told me a story about a placard posted on the wall of the van that both astrochimp and astronaut rode to the launch pad. “They had Alan Shepard’s trajectory plotted on [it]. We very carefully plotted Ham’s trajectory higher and farther.” (Owing to a malfunction, Ham flew 42 miles higher than planned.) “I’m telling you, it really pissed some people off. That thing disappeared in a minute.” Mercury launch pad director Guenter Wendt once reprimanded Shepard by threatening to replace him with one of those guys who works for bananas. Shepard, the story goes, threw an ashtray at his head.

Chimp humor was less nettlesome for John Glenn than it had been for Alan Shepard, because Enos wasn’t the media sensation Ham had been. At the time Ham flew, a pair of Soviet dogs, Belka and Strelka, had already returned alive from orbiting Earth, and the press was impatient for a U.S. milestone in space. When Ham splashed down alive, they presented him less as a research animal than as a sort of short, hairy astronaut. The chimp appeared on the cover of Life magazine in his mesh flight suit[44] beside the headline, “A Confident ‘Ham.’ Back from Space.” The public sopped it up. Letters and flowers and gifts addressed to Ham began arriving at the chimpanzee colony at Holloman Air Force Base, where Ham returned after his flight. People sent their copies of Life with requests for Ham’s “autograph.” Holloman staff gamely complied, the little hand pressed on inkpads over and over, so many times that a copy of Life “autographed” by Ham fetches just $4 on eBay. (And is possibly a fake: Fearing they’d “wear him out,” the staff, Britz told me, “just put any chimp’s hand on it after a while.”)

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?”[45]

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.”[46] 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[47]—one of those rare eulogies to incorporate numeric G force figures.

Enos had no memorial. A log book of Holloman chimp acquisitions[48] 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.

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[49] 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[50] 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.

Dooling thinks it unlikely that anyone at NASA gave serious thought to Cord and Seale’s one-way moon mission. But it does lend credence to the possibility that the aerospace community had—however fleetingly—considered launching a one-way chimped mission.

I went back and reread Williams’s AP stories. Outside of the headlines, there were no specific references to a lunar mission. Were the newspaper[51] editors taking liberties to make the story more provocative? I needed another source. Major Reynolds is dead. Jerry Fineg had left Holloman by 1962. Both he and Britz said they didn’t recall hearing anything about it, though Britz recalled seeing rhesus monkeys at Brooks Air Force Base, near San Antonio, being taught to operate a joystick. “They were trying to see if they could actually fly,” he told me in an email. “They were good!” Britz didn’t know what the ultimate goal of the project had been. I do know chimpanzees were being trained for space-related tasks at Brooks as late as 1964, because I found a paper that referred to a chimp injured in the spacecraft simulator when the foot plates malfunctioned and delivered more than the customary “small but annoying” electrical shock.

Air Force historian Rudy Purificato is at work on a history of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the other hotbed of aerospace medicine research in the sixties. I sent him a note. “There could very well have been actual plans to send a chimp to the moon,” he replied. He added that most of the primate research was still classified, and in that case Fineg and Britz (and Purificato) couldn’t talk about what they knew. So who would have told the AP reporter? He had probably, Purificato said, benefited from a “slip-up” by someone he interviewed.

Holloman Air Force Base is a ten-minute drive from the New Mexico Museum of Space History. Perhaps the base archives could provide some answers. The curator here at the New Mexico museum, George House, gave me a phone number to try. The staff played hot potato with my call until someone could locate the Person in Charge of Lying to the Press. The PCLP said that the room that houses the base archives is locked. And that only the curator would have a key. And that Holloman currently has no curator. Evidently the new curator’s first task would be to find a way to open the archives. Now I was sure of it: the chimp-to-the-moon files were locked up in there along with the Enos in-flight sex tapes and pictures of Colonel Stapp in a tutu. Paranoia is a way of life here in Alamogordo, home of the first atomic bomb test and not far from Roswell and Area 51, the secretive Air Force experimental aircraft proving ground/UFO hub. House said that emails containing the word primate, including some from me, mysteriously disappear en route to his computer. But House didn’t think it had anything to do with secret chimp moon missions. He said it had to do with a lawsuit filed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The suit isn’t against the Air Force per se, but rather the facility they’d contracted to take over the care—“care” being a rather gross overstatement—of the chimpanzee colony in the 1970s, when the Air Force no longer had use for them. Oh.

I went back out to the missile garden and paged through my photocopies again. I noticed something I’d overlooked. One of the articles said that before being taken out of the capsule, the chimp Glenda “had to re-enter through the jarring forces of earth’s atmosphere.” That meant Glenda’s simulated mission was round-trip, not one-way.

I’m guessing that Glenda was a simulated Gemini astronaut. (The Gemini space program, 1965 to 1966, was the precursor to the Apollo program’s lunar missions.) From 1964 to early 1966, “Chimp College” primates were called on to provide answers to questions like, What will happen to an astronaut if his pressure suit tears while he’s outside the capsule? “Previously,” said the AP reporter who covered a series of chimpanzee-crewed EVA simulations designed to answer that question, “scientists believed direct exposure to space vacuum would result in death, with the blood boiling and the lack of atmospheric pressure possibly leading to the body expanding and even bursting.”[52] Yet another reason Holloman can’t get their archives door open.

That the prospect of a chimpanzee-piloted lunar mission was taken seriously enough to be printed as news demonstrates how political the Apollo space program had been. The goal? Pure and simple: Land something before they do. Science on the first lunar surface missions was something of an afterthought: Pick up some rocks while you’re there, okay? The first geologist wouldn’t set foot on the moon until Apollo 17, six missions later.

The Cold War has ended, and the goals of space exploration are ostensibly grounded in science. There are those who argue that the science is more effectively—or cost-effectively, at least—carried out by robotic landers. And that the main reason to employ humans in space exploration and planetary science is to maintain the public’s interest and support. As the saying goes, “No bucks without Buck Rogers.”

Others disagree. “If your goal is to answer very specific questions like, How hard are the rocks on the surface of Mars? a robot is perfect. If your questions are bigger, like, What is the history of Mars? well, that’s a hell of a lot of robots,” says Ralph Harvey, a planetary geologist who has helped plan research expeditions on the moon. “But it could be only one or two human beings. Because human beings have this amazing tool called intuition, where they’ve built up a catalogue of experiences and they can draw on it instantaneously and spend one minute looking at a scene—whether it’s on Mars or at a crime scene—and know what happened here.”

For the past twenty-three years, Harvey has overseen the Antarctic Search for Meteorites, so he knows a great deal about doing geology under extremely harsh conditions. When we spoke, he had just returned from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where he was helping plan a lunar traverse scheduled to take place sometime around 2025.[53]

Why does it take fifteen years to plan an outing on the moon? You’ll see.