found it scientifically interesting but not particularly amusing – I’m a meat-eating chav and certainly not a full on hippy animal rights protestor type but unlike the human NASA astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts none of the animals sent into space got a choice and many suffered various hardships…
marcusblanc;311817 wrote:
and if you look closely at his eyes, i think he is dosed up with somethin, he looks totally blissed out! :laugh_at: Talk about a space cadet… 😉
given his (understandable) reactions to being shaken about, shocked by all the malfunctioning kit and otherwise knocked around, I expect the NASA boffins would have given him a good shot of some sort of barbiturate (ketamine hadn’t been invented back then) to stop him beating up on the other NASA dude and spoiling the photo op..
if you’ve read the Wiki you will have also seen how he was called #65 and only named after he got back safely as they didn’t want bad publicity if he had got killed on the mission..
At least he got given to a zoo after serving the country, rather than experimented on even more…. he only lived to age 26, which isn’t very long for a chimp in captivity – life expectancy is normally 60-70 years (not unlike many of us humans TBH!)
apparently initially NASA tried to use cats, all of which were rejected as they refused to take part in the directed tasks assigned to them….
