On this day in space! Sept. 16, 1949: A US launch of a V-2 rocket explodes, killing its monkey passenger Albert III

On Sept. 16, 1949, the U.S. launched a V-2 rocket with a monkey named Albert III on board.

Albert III was the third monkey the U.S. attempted to launch to space. He was also the third one to be killed on the job. The U.S. precursor to NASA began launching monkeys into space in the 1940s to try to see what might happen to humans in space.

This testing started more than a decade before any humans were launched up there. The monkeys were all given anesthetics and covered with sensors and probes that monitored their vitals. While the other five Alberts that were launched on V-2 rockets were all rhesus monkeys, Albert III was actually a long-tailed macaque. Sadly, Albert III died when his rocket exploded 10 seconds after launch.

The two Alberts who came before him died differently, first by suffocation and then by a parachute that failed to deploy before landing. It wasn't until the Albert VI flew in 1961 that a test monkey survived a test launch. NASA stopped using monkeys for launch testing in the 1980s.

A small macaque monkey named Albert III was lost during a failed V-2 rocket launch test from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on Sept. 16, 1949. (Image credit: Future/NASA)

Why it mattered

In the late 1940s, the United States was just beginning to gain experience with large rocket and ballistic missile launches using a cache of V-2 rockets (and the German rocket scientists like Werhner von Braun that designed them). And while the U.S. military sought to develop rocket and missile weapons, animal launches like the failed flight of Albert III were aimed studying how the upper atmosphere and cosmic rays could affect living things (like future astronauts).

To do that, the U.S. Air Force formed Project Blossom, a series of V-2 rocket launches out of White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico that included five "biological flights" overseen by the Aero-Medical Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, according to a history by the White Sands Missile Range Museum.

Albert III's launch failed 24.7 seconds after liftoff, with the V-2 rocket flying at a slower speed than expected after liftoff, the museum account states. The rocket suffered an explosion in its tail section 10.7 seconds into the flight, then another one 14 seconds later (likely due to leaks in its alchol fuel system). It reached a maximum altitude of just 3 miles before the failure.

Despite the failure, military scientists took what they learned from Albert III's launch to make design improvements in future tests. There were still failures (the next monkey launch of Alberts IV did not succeed), and three of the seven Project Blossom launch tests failed in all.

The first successful monkey launch carried Albert VI (and 11 mice) to suborbital space and back on a new Aerobee rocket on Sept. 20, 1951, NASA has said.

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