Michael Shinabery: Enos the chimp and his two orbits in space

Moonandback posts another two part space history report from  Michael Shinabery. This one is about America’s first primate astronauts:

“Enos was a good chimp. He was smart but he didn’t take to people,” Ed Dittmer, who trained primates at the Aero Medical facility at Holloman Air Force Base, said in a 1987 oral history. “A lot of people had the wrong impression of Enos. They said he was a mean chimp and so forth, but he wasn’t really mean. He just didn’t take to cuddling.”

Enos’ two-orbit flight was a major accomplishment in the Cold War-era Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union.