Word: chimp
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...Cape Canaveral was a Redstone, a militarily obsolete but reliable Army rocket. Perched on its nose was a Mercury space capsule, designed to carry a man into orbit and bring him back alive. The capsule was standard size, but its interior had been tailored for a chimp and supplied with special gear and fittings for its non-human passenger...
...midnight before the flight, the chosen chimp was given a final physical examination. At this stage his official name was "No. 65." because the National Aeronautics and Space Administration did not want him to achieve too much public personality, just in case he did not return alive. His name while in training at the Air Force's Holloman Aeromedical Field Laboratory had been Chop Chop Chang. Only if he survived his space trip would he be permitted to use the appealing name "Ham," derived from the initials of his training place...
Gelatin & Diaper. For breakfast Chimp No. 65 got an ounce of baby cereal, 4 oz. of condensed milk, cooking oil, gelatin, vitamins and half an egg. Then he was wired for recording instruments, dressed in a baby diaper and strapped on his back on a personally fitted contour couch, his arms left free. The environmental control system (air pressure, oxygen, temperature, etc.) was much the same as for a human astronaut...
Every morning after a light breakfast of fruit and special chimp chow the chimponauts are given medical examinations and driven in a panel truck to the testing center of the laboratory's Comparative Psychology Branch. There they are taught to wear carefully fitted space suits and to tolerate being strapped for long periods on softly padded contour couches. They are taken up in stunting aircraft to get accustomed to sudden noise, vibration and G forces, and to learn what weightlessness feels like. Even before they have been hardened to all these physiological "insults," their psychological training has begun...
Defeated VIP. A typical task taught to chimponauts requires them to watch three shapes flashed on a screen and decide by pushing the proper lever which shape is not like either of the others. By doing this correctly 18 times, a chimp earns a banana-flavored food pellet. Some of them become amazingly skillful. The champion so far is a chimp that worked the levers 7,000 times in 70 minutes with only 32 errors. A human VIP visiting the lab rashly tried the same task and made a much lower score...