Miss Baker Auburn University after attaining the record for oldest living squirrel monkey. She is buried on the grounds at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. Her tombstone routinely has one or more bananas on top. Miss Baker Miss Baker (1957 – November 29, 1984) was a squirrel monkey who in 1959 became, along with rhesus macaque Miss Able, one of the first two animals launched into space by the United States and safely returned. Previous United States efforts at launching monkeys to space had met with the animals' demise from suffocation or parachute failure, and Soviet Union efforts had fared little
Miss Baker the Naval Aerospace Medical Center in Pensacola, Florida until 1971. In 1971, Miss Baker moved to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where she entertained museum visitors and drew 100–150 letters a day from schoolchildren. The 1977 birthday celebrations brought balloons, camera flashes, and the regular fare of cottage cheese for Miss Baker and Big George. Big George predeceased Miss Baker on January 8, 1979, and three months later, Norman, from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, became her second mate in a ceremony presided over by Alabama District Court judge Dan McCoy. Miss Baker refused to