Little Old Reliable

Space pioneer of the week: a male Latin American squirrel monkey. Strapped into a rubber-padded chamber in the nose cone of a Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missile, the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed beast, Little Old Reliable by name, made space-research history as the first higher mammal to travel hundreds of miles into space, where only a Russian dog and U.S. mice had gone before. Purpose of the test: to gather data on how a human might fare in space flight. Reasons for picking a squirrel monkey: small size--Little Old Reliable weighed less than 1 lb.--and close anatomical similarity to humans.

The Army Jupiter with Little Old Reliable aboard got off its Cape Canaveral launching pad in a perfect takeoff. Atop the passenger's head was a tiny helmet with a microphone attached to record vocal sounds, and fitted into the little compartment were assorted instruments to measure heartbeat rate, blood pressure, body temperature, breathing rate. During the first few minutes of flight, while the missile was accelerating under the thrust of its engines, telemetering devices reported slowed-down and irregular breathing, slightly speeded-up heartbeat. Then, during about eight minutes of weightlessness while the missile was in ballistic flight, breathing and heartbeat went back to normal, indicating that, for eight minutes at least, weightlessness causes no severe immediate physiological changes.

Some 15 minutes and 1.500 miles after the Jupiter soared into the sky, its nose cone plunged into the Atlantic off the West Indian island of Martinique. The cone had been fitted up with devices--automatically inflated float, flashing light, beeping radio transmitter, etc.--that had enabled Navy-Army task forces to find and recover three earlier Jupiter nose cones. But this time, somehow, the apparatus failed to work. After searching for six hours, the task force gave up, and the Army announced that Little Old Reliable was missing in action and presumed dead. But after his electronic fashion, he had made his contribution to the physiological space chart.

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