On September 20, 1951, a rhesus monkey named Yorick was strapped into the nose cone of a US Air Force rocket and shot straight up into the New Mexico sky. He didn’t fly alone. He took eleven mice with him. Almost 45 miles above the desert, the Aerobee missile carried its passengers 236,000 feet up before the capsule turned around and fell back to Earth, according to NASA’s own history office. The flight succeeded, and that made Yorick briefly notable, but the full tale of what happened after he landed is far less triumphant than some retellings suggest.
Why was a monkey strapped to a rocket?
