A fascinating alternative to the standard histories of the US space race, this shows what NASA owed to a handful of highly trained (and highly temperamental) chimpanzees. There were initially over a hundred numbered chimp subjects of the programme, and despite all the urging from the Mercury Seven humans, it was Ham the chimpanzee who first went to space under a US flag. Here then is the whole gamut of information about how they were trained to do what they needed to do both on earth and above it, to prove the human brain could cope with space travel, all the drama of Ham's bodged trajectory and awkward recovery, and more.

All told, this is excellent – to a point. It starts with a very modern apologia for the whole idea of it, even there being a "bird farm" for some of the captured chimps to be bred and grown at. Nowhere is it shown that all the research done on these potential chimponauts helped us know just how creditable and intelligent they actually were, counting to fifty as they proved they could do, and more. Nowhere is it pointed out that feeding the beasts a bottle of soda each night might not have been ideal for them. Nowhere does it really delve into the contrasting ideas of the Soviets, and cosmocanines like Laika are barely mentioned, save a certain gift to the Kennedy administration.

But this is still a wonderful eye-opener. You can feel the anger from the test pilots with their thousands of hours of experience, being forced to play second-fiddle to some button-pushing banana-munchers. You can easily imagine the pride some of the beasts would have had in mastering their tasks for their human handlers, and then finding the reality of 17g when forced to undergo it by accident. And it is imbalanced in the way just a few actual space chimps take up so many pages as opposed to all the brave humans and scientists and engineers the space race also involved. But as the last pages prove there is a lot of false information about these characters out there, and this is a perfect corrective for that. Many an adult space fan will learn a lot from this readable and engaging all-ages story. In probably being the best book on this theme we're likely to get, it's more or less a full five stars.