In the Works
The Constellation of Ham: Pictures and Words for Adults
The Constellation of Ham is a longstanding idea for an illustrated work about Ham, the chimpanzee Americans trained and sent into space in January 1961 as part of Project Mercury.
I began researching it seriously in 2022. That April, I spent time in the archives of the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo and several days at Holloman Air Force Base, working with the 49th Wing historian and visiting sites connected with the early primate space program.
I’m still asking how to tell Ham’s story in a way that holds both his place in the history of human spaceflight and the fact that he was an individual animal with a life beyond the role humans gave him.
Perhaps it will be a collection of reflections on his life, seen through an illustrator’s eyes and heard through the voices of people who shaped his life. It might become a book, or a series of pictures and words that can be seen separately.
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Pairing my drawings with words from people of the period feels like collaborating with a host of co-authors — among them Alton Freeman, the Florida animal broker who​ sold Ham to the Air Force; the young airmen who took care of him; the research scientists who studied his body’s responses to “unusual environments”; and the astronauts who followed him.
From a series of studies using period photographs and an on-site visit to Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico.
Who was this chimpanzee the world called hero, then victim?
Ham’s contributions to space exploration are not what justify his life. He had his own pleasures, pains, desires and preferences and, as such, he mattered for his own sake.
This still captivates me. Sixty-five years after his flight, I want to interpret Ham’s legacy for myself. Pairing words and drawings is my way to listen more closely, to explore contradictions, uncertainties and inconvenient narratives.
​On-site Research: In April 2022, I spent a week at Holloman Air Force Base, drawing and puzzling through the primate program with the 49th Wing historian. The visit gave me places to put the histories, archival film, photographs and scientific papers I had been studying. At the New Mexico Museum of Space History, I sat in the stacks and listened to the Assistant Curator. Ham is a deeply felt story for people in Alamogordo.
The Facts: The Mercury Chimpanzee Program began in October of 1958 with the mission to test the life support systems of the mercury spacecraft as well as the effects of spaceflight on the body. There were 65 chimpanzees in the colony overseen by the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. By April 1959, a small group of these chimpanzees began daily training and conditioning for space flight, eventually undergoing the same simulations as the Mercury 7 astronauts. In July of 1959, just two years old and weighing 19 pounds, Ham (#65, then called Chang) joined this group of “chimponauts.” By early 1960, six chimpanzees, including Ham, were well on their way to being rated space-flight ready.
To put Ham’s life into context: it was this same year, in July 1960, that across the Atlantic, the young Jane Goodall traveled from England to Africa to begin the pioneering study of chimpanzees in the wild.
And it was 8 years before we experienced that moment of humbling connection — Earthrise. Taken from lunar orbit during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, this photograph of our small blue planet rising above the lunar horizon radically shifted our perspective about our home.
In Ham’s early life, we had yet to see the Earth as fragile and glimpse ourselves, as Archibald MacLeish so memorably wrote on Christmas Day, 1968, as “riders on the Earth together, … brothers who know now that they are truly brothers.”
Ham is the baby chimpanzee whose most solitary and frightening moments made possible some of humankind’s most daring ones.
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We have yet to fully appreciate that he was a brother, too.