ROCKET RIDE TO EARTH 5 T-Shirt

Ham (July 1957 – January 19, 1983), a chimpanzee also known as Ham the Chimp and Ham the Astrochimp, was the first great ape launched into space. On January 31, 1961, Ham flew a suborbital flight on the Mercury-Redstone 2 mission, part of the U.S. space program's Project Mercury. Ham's name is an acronym for the laboratory that prepared him for his historic mission—the Holloman Aerospace Medical Centre, located at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, southwest of Alamogordo. His name was also in honour of the commander of Holloman Aeromedical Laboratory, Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton "Ham" Blackshear.