Before Bezos and Branson, there were Baker and Able
In the early morning hours of May 28, 1959, a Jupiter missile launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, sending Baker and Able—two small monkeys—hurtling across the sky like a shooting star. Over the next 16 minutes, Baker, an 11-ounce squirrel monkey from Peru, and Able, a rhesus monkey born in Independence, Kansas, flew 1,700 miles and reached an altitude of 360 miles above Earth’s surface, higher than the Hubble Space Telescope orbits today.
Able died in a medical procedure days later, but Baker lived until 1984, when she was buried at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. People leave bananas at her grave to this day.Before he commanded Gemini 8 and Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong was a test pilot for the ultimate experimental aircraft: the X-15 rocket plane. A joint project of the U.S. military, NASA, and private industry, the X-15 pushed the boundaries of flight beyond six times the speed of sound.
have ventured more than 50 miles above Earth’s surface—the U.S. boundary for space—and human spaceflight is entering a new phase. Flights beyond Earth are becoming cheaper and more frequent, and private enterprises are aiming to send more people to space than ever before. What does the future hold for human journeys beyond Earth’s atmosphere? How often will future generations fly to orbit and beyond? How far will explorers travel?looked back through more than six decades’ worth of spaceflight images, highlighting historic moments in humans’ forays into the inky void. Before launching human astronauts, NASA used chimpanzees and other primates to test its Mercury capsule.
Billionaire Richard Branson has spent 17 years trying to commercialize a bigger, upgraded version of SpaceShipOne. On July 11, 2021, his company Virgin Galactic took a major step toward that goal when the company’s V.S.S. Unity space plane flew two pilots and four crew members, including Branson, more than 50 miles above Earth’s surface.Share
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