Ham the First Chimp in Space

Ham (1957 – January 19, 1983) was a chimpanzee and the first hominid launched into space. On January 31, 1961, Ham flew on the Mercury-Redstone 2 mission, part of the U.S. space program's Project Mercury. Ham's name is an acronym for the laboratory that prepared him for his historic mission—the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center, located at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. It was only after his missions that he was given the name. The dark side of this story was that after completing his mission HAM was left all alone in a zoo and died 17 years later.