Talk:US History/Eisenhower Civil Rights Fifties

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Enos the Chimp
Enos (died November 4, 1962) was a chimpanzee that was launched into space.

Enos was purchased from the Miami Rare Bird Farm in April 3, 1960. He completed more than 1,250 hours of training for his mission at the University of Kentucky and Holloman Air Force Base. His training was more intense than that of Ham, the Americans' first chimp in space, because Enos would be exposed to weightlessness and a higher g for longer periods of time. His training included psychomotor training and aircraft flights.

Enos was selected to make the first orbital animal flight only three days before the launch. Two months before allowing a chimp to be launched into orbit, NASA had launched Mercury Atlas 4 on September 13, 1961, to conduct the same mission with a "crewman simulator" in the spacecraft. Enos flew into space on board Mercury Atlas 5 on November 29, 1961. He completed his first orbit in 1 hour, 28.5 minutes.

Spider webs in space
Spider webs in space were spun in 1973 aboard Skylab, involving two female European garden spiders (cross spiders) called Arabella and Anita. As part of an experiment, the two spiders were taken into low earth orbit on the Skylab 3 mission. The aim of the experiment was to test whether the two spiders would spin webs in space, and, if so, whether these webs would be the same as those that spiders produced on Earth. The experiment was a student project of Judy Miles of Lexington, Massachusetts. A similar experiment was conducted on board Columbia's ill fated final mission using Australian spiders provided to NASA by various institutions in Melbourne.

When scientists were given the opportunity to study the webs, they discovered that the space-webs were finer than normal Earth webs, and although the patterns of the web were not totally dissimilar, variations were spotted, and there was a definite difference in the characteristics of the web. Additionally, while the webs were finer overall, the space-web had variations in thickness in places, some places were slightly thinner, and others slightly thicker. This was unusual, because Earth webs have been observed to have uniform thickness.