Click on the icon to view a 2-minute video from the Miss Able 50th anniversary commemoration ceremony in Independence on May 28.

 

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BY ANDY TAYLOR

INDEPENDENCE — Fifty years ago this month, America’s space race caught the attention of Montgomery County when one of its own natives got a free ticket to outer space.

She was a rhesus monkey dubbed “Able” by the U.S. military, but before she joined another fellow squirrel monkey cohort Baker in a brief space trip on May 28, 1959, she was catching peanuts as a resident of Monkey Island at Independence’s Riverside Park.

Few people paid attention when the generation of rhesus monkeys left Monkey Island in 1958 and were replaced with a pack of spider monkeys.

But, when the U.S. Army and the newly-formed National Aeronautical Space Administration (NASA) needed rhesus monkeys for study in an actual space flight, they looked no further than the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wis., where the former Independence rhesus monkeys had made their new home. The U.S. Army grabbed four of the rhesus monkeys that were born in Independence, put them through a training course of button pushing at Cape Canaveral, Fla., and lined them up for a possible ride where no monkey had gone before: outer space.

Why monkeys? The U.S. military and NASA were trying to determine the effects of space and weightlessness on the body. And, because the rhesus monkey’s skeletal frame was so identical to humans, the military and NASA believed the rhesus variety of monkey could be the top candidates for study during and after a trip into space.

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