Able and Baker
“Able and Baker: Not Invented Here”, excerpt from essay published in Agni.
The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all, / And the star of the sailor, and Mars, / These shone in the sky, and the pail by the wall / Would be half full of water and stars.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, “Escape at Bedtime”
On May 28, 1959, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency launched a Jupiter Medium Range Ballistic Missile (MRBM) from Cape Canaveral carrying two monkeys named Able and Baker lodged in its nose cone. This was not the first experiment using animals to test physiological reactions to suborbital space flight, nor would it be the last. Previous missions by the Americans and the Soviets—beginning with an American mission carrying fruit flies in 1947—had included mice and dogs, and other species would follow Able and Baker, such as guinea pigs, nematodes, Japanese tree frogs, oyster toadfish, Madagascar hissing cockroaches, South African flat rock scorpions, and tardigrades. Animal rights groups reacted with condemnation, terming the Able and Baker mission “scientific devilry.”
Able was an American-born, seven-pound rhesus monkey. Reportedly feisty, she was, I imagine, hard to strap onto her skateboard-like cot. Her squirrel monkey companion, the mellow Peruvian Miss Baker, had trained at the Naval School in Pensacola. A mere eleven ounces, she rode inside a cot the size and shape of a thermos flask capable of holding no more than two cups of tea. Electrodes and wires pocked and wound their small bodies.
Together Able and Baker traveled 1,700 miles in sixteen minutes, reaching a top speed of 10,000 miles per hour and an altitude of 360 miles. They withstood thirty-eight times the normal pull of gravity and were weightless for nine minutes. “Never send a man to do a female monkey’s job,” quipped the press on their return. After splashdown forty miles north of Antigua, the message transmitted from the USS Kiowa read, “Able Baker perfect. No injuries or other difficulties.” When interviewed, Lieutenant Joseph E. Guion said the nose cone had “looked like an extremely large shooting star, very white and blinking. It was a little sun falling down. . . .” Feted, the duo appeared less than three weeks later, propped in front of the Stars and Stripes on the cover of Life magazine, by which time Able was dead, following complications during surgery to remove an electrode.
We get the call to say they are coming while I’m having a bath…
