Today is Take a Monkey to Lunch Day, which celebrates all things monkey-related. Although if you did take a monkey to lunch, it might steal your fruit, probably couldn’t sit still, and might leave smelly poop behind.
This day celebrates monkeys like Miss Baker, a squirrel monkey, and Able, a Rhesus monkey, who were the first primates to be sent into space by the United States, and return to the Earth, in 1959. (They were also the first non-human primates to go into space. Russia sent the first human astronaut into space, in 1961).
Born in Independence, Kansas, Able flew inside a Jupiter nose cone with Miss Baker, on May 28, 1959, in an Army experiment designed to test the health effects of space travel. Launched from Cape Canaveral, they reached a maximum altitude of 300 miles and traveled downrange 2,000 miles at speeds reaching 10,000 miles per hour before reentering the Earth’s atmosphere and being recovered by Navy ships. Both monkeys survived the trip, but Able died from anesthesia during a routine post-flight operation.
Take a Monkey to Lunch Day also apparently celebrates apes like Koko, a western lowland gorilla who learned over 1,000 words in sign language. She loved her kitten, which she called “All Ball.” Apes are not monkeys, in our view, but Wikipedia says that “cladistically” apes are “monkeys,” whatever that means.
