Mercury-Redstone 2 Ham – t he first hominid in space A three-year-old chimpanzee, named Ham, in the biopack couch for the MR-2 suborbital test flight. Credit: NASA Mercury-Redstone 2 (MR-2) was launched on a suborbital flight at 16:55 UTC on January 31, 1961, from LC-5 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The mission was to test the Mercury capsule and the launch vehicle before launching the first American astronaut. The capsule carried a chimpanzee named Ham, the first hominid in space. The capsule and Ham landed safely in the Atlantic Ocean 16 minutes and 39 seconds after launch. Officially, Ham was known as “Number 65” before his flight, and only renamed "Ham", after the Holoman Aerospace Medical Center, upon his successful return to Earth. He was taught to pull levers in response to the flashing light. Ham was born in July 1957 and was 3 years 8 months old at launch. The objectives of MR-2 were to: (1) obtain physiological and performance data on a primate in ...