 When we think about primates in space, we usually think of ham and enos, the two chimps NASA launched in advance of its Mercury astronauts in the early 1960s, but more than a decade before these famous chimps took flight, scientists launched Rhesus monkeys on V2 missiles. All named Albert, they were among the first casualties of the early space age. Within a year of the Second World War's close, America imported more than a hundred German rocket engineers and tons of V2 missile parts and supporting documentation. Both men and machines were sent to the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, where the V2s would be studied, repaired when necessary, assembled, and launched as part of Project Hermes. Within Hermes were a number of spin-off programs, including the Blossom program, which was a biological series of launches designed to help gather data for future spaceflight. The idea was to send small primates and animals on suborbital flights to gather data that might apply to future human space travelers. These Blossom V2s were specially modified. They carried different warheads than the standard missile and boasted fuselages 65 inches longer than the standard V2 rocket. And four of these Blossom rockets had Rhesus monkeys named Albert on board. Albert 1 launched aboard V2 number 37 on June 11th, 1948. The missile reached an apogee of 39 miles, but Albert 1 didn't make it. He succumbed to respiratory issues inside his cramped capsule, but he probably wouldn't have survived anyways. The parachute designed to deliver him safely back to the ground failed. Albert 2 launched on V2 number 47 on June 14th, 1949. He fared slightly better than his predecessor, surviving launch to reach an apogee of 83 miles. But again, the parachute recovery system failed, and Albert 2 was killed instantly upon impact with the ground. A slight sliver lining for the scientists running the test was that all the biomedical instrumentation on board had transmitted data throughout the flight. Albert 3 launched on V2 number 32 on September 16th, 1949, but he didn't last long. This V2 suffered a tail explosion 10.7 seconds after liftoff and was destroyed just three miles above the launch pad. The monkey was killed in the explosion. Albert 4, who launched on V2 number 31 on December 8th, 1949, suffered a similar fate to Albert 2. Albert 4 survived the launch and reached an altitude of 79 miles, sending biomedical data to scientists the whole time. He, too, was killed when his parachute system failed. The Albert's gruesome deaths underlined just how immature the science of rocketry and rocket testing was in late 1940s. It also underscores just how far rocketry had come by the time NASA was ready to launch men on the same suborbital flights in 1961. Leave questions or comments below, and for weekly vintage space updates, don't forget to subscribe.