The old adage ‘what goes up must come down’ does not apply to Mancos resident Harry Hance, who was once a part of a secretive and little-known program to send mice and monkeys into space during the space race of the 1950s and early 1960s.

With the Russian launch of the Sputnik 1 in 1957, the U.S. sought to catch up in space technology.

Enter mice, monkeys and Harry Hance.

“So they came up with two programs,” Hance said. “One was NASA out of Florida and the Discovery program out of Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.”

At the time, Hance thought the goal of the Discovery program was to get three sets of mice into orbit and then three flights of monkeys, with the eventual goal of getting man into space. He would later find out the program had a more sinister motive.

Working under General Electric and Lockheed, Hance was a laboratory technician and biologist for the program charged with measuring the respiration and analyzing the air supply for the animals as well as studying how much impact mice could sustain from a fall.

“All this stuff, when I was in there, was all secret,” Hance said. “When I was with a big group of people, engineers and people working. We had a badge of secrecy. We couldn’t even talk to other people about what we were doing, even in the plant. Unless they had a need to know.”

Although Hance can’t remember exact dates, and staff on the project were sworn to secrecy, details of the project leaked through word of mouth to Hance, who never saw a launch first hand.

Mice were to be sent up in sets of four. At first, mice capsule were dropped by an airplane off the coast of Virginia into the ocean to see if they could successfully be recovered by U.S. Navy aircraft.

“I don’t know the details, because I wasn’t there,” Hance said. “But I heard they dropped the things and they would recover it. They wanted to make sure the Navy could pick these things out of the Ocean. And the first tank that they dropped, they never recovered. The Navy aircraft missed it on the first pass. They turned around to pick it up and the propellers cut holes in the can, water got in and it went to the bottom of the ocean. They lost the mice.”

The first attempt to launch the mice into orbit was equally challenging.

“The first shot of mice went up and they don’t know where it went,” he said. “The guidance wasn’t perfected very well. It was the beginning of space, and nobody knew much. Rockets were completely new.”

The second launch went into orbit, Hance said, but when it was called back to Earth, nothing happened because the circuits were frozen.

More hope was held for the third launch of mice after the other issues were resolved. Hance said a press conference was planned at a hotel to announce the success of the spaceflight.

However, a sensor in the orbiting craft was 180 degrees out of alignment, and when the craft was ordered to come down to Earth, it went up and farther out into space.

“There was a group of men sitting around having a drink and talking and all that stuff,” Hance said. “And the mice never came back. ... So we all broke up the conference when we found out it wasn’t coming back.”

The program then shifted toward monkeys, which never got off the ground because of issues with nitrogen leaking into the life cell containing the animal. Hance said he watched on his instruments as nitrogen levels inside the capsule went up and oxygen levels went down.

“As far as I know, we never killed a monkey,” he said.

As a result, the first two launches went up without the monkey in the craft. All hope was placed on the third monkey launch, but an executive order from above ordered the payload switched from a live monkey to an American flag.

Absent Hance’s monkey, the orbiter, Discoverer 13 was launched in August of 1960 with Old Glory aboard and would go down in history as the first craft to successfully reach orbit and return to splash down off the coast of Hawaii for recovery. The American flag aboard was presented to President Dwight D. Eisenhower after the flight.

After that, other soviet and NASA space programs began sending men into space and the animal program, along with Hance, became obsolete.

Although he didn’t know it at the time, Hance’s program may have never been meant to succeed. Declassified in 1995 by President Clinton, the Discovery animal launch program was really a cover-up for a spy satellite project code named CORONA, which was designed to take photographs from space to replace the U2 spy plane during the Cold War.

According to the Army Space Journal, the CORONA project took more than 860,000 photographs of sensitive Soviet targets between 1960 and 1972.

“We were depressed a lot of the times hearing all the bad things,” Hance said. “We were working all this stuff, we wanted it to be successful and everything. We didn’t know this was a hoax and a cover up for the spy satellite anyway. But all the people who worked on it were serious and wanted them to be successful and were depressed when it wasn’t.”

Despite the apparent failure of the project, Hance and his colleagues published their studies on oxygen poisoning, impact testing and mouse respiration. Hance believes these studies may have been reviewed and utilized by scientists in the more successful NASA program.

After a career as a university laboratory technician, Hance retired in Mancos, where he volunteers on Fridays at the visitor’s center.

“I’m not looking for publicity, I just think this stuff here should be in history,” he said. “This is what the United States did, and I was just a small part of it.”

Reach Reid Wright at reidw@cortezjournal.com.