Lounging on his back with the breeze ruffling his fur, Marty the chimpanzee is scratching his belly, lost in thought as he watches for the golf cart that delivers his bananas around this time every day.
From his shady lair, he can gaze at the blue sky above him, the black storm clouds gathering on the horizon and the open fields that stretch for kilometres around. Some days, he can even look towards Nasa's Kennedy Space Centre, 130 kilometres away, and see the space shuttle climbing into the sky.
But his utopian existence and relaxed demeanour speak nothing of the horrors he endured in the five decades before he was granted peace at the Save the Chimps sanctuary in Fort Pierce, Florida.
One of dozens of infant chimpanzees seized in Africa for the US Air Force in the 1950s, he was recruited into the military's air-and-space research programme, which helped to pave the way for America's first manned space flight in 1961 and, ultimately, the Apollo XI moon landing on July 20, 1969.
Animals were used as crash-test dummies, spun at high speed in centrifuges, squeezed in compression chambers, subjected to zero gravity and sleep deprivation, and, in a test code-named Project Whoosh, ejected from missiles at supersonic speeds.
Two became fully fledged 'chimponauts' fulfilling solo space missions as part of Nasa's Mercury programme; Ham rocketed beyond earth's atmosphere in 1961 three months before Alan Shephard became the first American to do so, and Enos orbited earth later that year, allowing astronaut John Glenn to follow suit in 1962.