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 nose with model cement, and she was fitted into a snug capsule of shoebox size, 9¾ × 12½ × 6¾ inches (24.8 × 31.8 × 17.1 cm) insulated with rubber and fiberglass. Life support was an oxygen bottle with a pressure valve, and lithium hydroxide to absorb exhaled carbon dioxide and moisture. On May 28, 1959, at 2:39 am, a Jupiter rocket lifted Miss Baker and Miss Able to an altitude of through an acceleration of 38 gs for a 16-minute flight which also included 9 minutes of weightlessness. The flight traveled downrange from the pad at Cape Canaveral launch