[protomyth]

Wow, do yourself a favor and read the comments section since the Project Officer, tracking antenna designer, a co-worker of one of the engineers, and a trajectory dynamics engineer for General Dynamics. They all dispute the one comment saying the bears were hurt / destroyed although the chimpanzee was slightly injured.

[alemhnan]

It's bit controversial anyway cause another comment tells a different story altogether:

'''According to the government white paper on the subject all bears were destroyed shortly on return to base. All but the last three bears suffered serious internal injuries and multiple broken bones. 'Several hundred' bears were acquired for this purpose, all of which were destroyed 'in or after the testing process, by the testing process or by gun shot to the heart to preserve cranial damage from impacts'.'''

[protomyth]

That’s the comment I referenced, but notice the white paper is never linked or even titled.

[toomanybeersies]

I found the paper: Impact Acceleration Stress. 1962

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=WTQrAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA92&dq...

None of the bears suffered serious injuries beyond broken bones and whiplash, but they were killed and autopsied afterwards. The paper doesn't explicitly state how many bears were used, and I think hundreds might be an exaggeration, but at least a couple of dozen bears were used based on the number of tests run.

[Waterluvian]

Respectfully, what's your thinking for why hundreds seems like an exaggeration and is probably dozens instead?

[toomanybeersies]

There were only 7 tests done using bears, and one using a chimp.

It seems like it would be prohibitively difficult to source several hundred bears when you only plan on doing a few tests. You have to buy them and then you need to find somewhere to put them. Even if money wasn't an issue (and likely wouldn't be on those Cold War budgets), just the logistics of the problem would make it unlikely they'd source more bears than they needed.

[Waterluvian]

Aha, yes that does make hundreds seem absurd.

[chiph]

That one comment is really out of line with what I know about ejection seat testing. Did they use bears? Yes. Hundreds of bears? No. The same bears hundreds of times? As the other comments said - they would have had to drug the bears to the point where the physio data was worthless.

The USAF museum in Dayton Ohio has one of the escape modules on display (I saw it back in 2004-ish).

http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-...