Lounging on his back with the breeze ruffling his hair, Marty the chimpanzee is scratching his belly as he watches for the golf cart that delivers bananas at around this time every day.

From his shady lair he can gaze at the blue sky and open fields that stretch for miles around. 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 spaceflight in 1961 and, ultimately, the Apollo 11 Moon landing 40 years ago this month.

Animals were used as crash-test dummies, spun at high speed in centrifuges, squeezed in compression chambers, subjected to zero gravity and sleep deprivation studies and, in a test codenamed Project Whoosh, ejected from missiles at supersonic speeds.

Times Archive 1969 Man takes first steps on the moon

'That's one small step for man but one giant leap for mankind'

• Topic: Men on the Moon

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Two, Ham and Enos, became fully fledged “chimponauts” on 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 the astronaut John Glenn to follow in 1962. The chimps have since died.

“When the astronauts came back from their space missions they received ticker-tape parades and were rightfully considered heroes. But the chimps were forgotten and relegated along with their descendants to biomedical research laboratories,” Jen Feuerstein, the sanctuary director, said.

As America marks the 40th anniversary of man’s first footsteps on the Moon, Marty and friends rely solely on charity to support their retirement. Nasa and the US Government have never donated a penny towards Save the Chimps’ annual $4 million (£2.5 million) budget. But astronauts have — among them Bob Crippen, 71, who piloted the first orbital test flight of the space shuttle in 1981, commanded three subsequent shuttle missions and served as a director of Nasa’s shuttle programme in the 1990s.

“Now that we have become a lot more familiar with space we know in retrospect, ‘Hey, we could have put someone up there without all these tests’, but that’s hindsight,” he said. “Back in the Fifties and Sixties we really didn’t know a lot about chimps and there probably weren’t in most people’s minds a lot of alternatives to test spaceflight and reach this very lofty goal of going to the Moon,” Ms Feuerstein said. “These chimps were captured from their forest homes and transplanted to a life of captivity, fear and pain.”

By the early 1970s, the Government had no further need for the chimps and leased them out for biomedical research. In 1997, it declared them “surplus inventory” and sold them to a toxicology laboratory in New Mexico.

Appalled by their plight, the primatologist Dr Carole Noon sued and won custody of the 21 surviving Air Force chimps, followed in 2002 by a further 250 or so others at the laboratory.

She died of cancer in May, but lived to see 159 of her adoptees transported 2,000 miles to the sanctuary she built in Florida, travelling ten at a time in a specially adapted trailer. By the time they have all arrived by late 2011, the vehicle will have travelled a distance equivalent to four laps of the Earth. The sanctuary has the largest chimp population in the world.

In New Mexico, the chimps lived in solitary confinement in tiny concrete cells. In the sanctuary they reside in groups on 3.5-acre islands, where they run free in the grass, climb on jungle gyms and laze in hammocks.

“It’s really exciting and emotional for them when they go out on to the island for the first time. Often they will hug and kiss one another as if to say, ‘Look at this, it’s all for us’,” Ms Feuerstein said. There is no man-made boundary to keep them on their islands, just tranquil moats, and the only fencing is around the buildings where they sleep and feed. Staff are not allowed to touch them and public access is denied.

In confinement, their diet consisted of monkey chow, akin to dog biscuits. Now they have fresh fruit and vegetables, plus treats such as sunflower seeds hidden inside tennis balls and bamboo filled with peanut butter. Staff serve 1,925lb of apples, 2,520lb of bananas, 840lb of oranges and 980lb of tomatoes a week. The annual food bill is about $450,000.

Lists taped on the kitchen walls note the daily menu, along with reminders that some chimps have food allergies: Gabe cannot eat mangoes, for example, and Rowan has peanut allergies.

“Chimps are remarkably forgiving. If I had been in their position, I think I would probably hate the entire human race — but they don’t,” Ms Feuerstein said. “They warm quickly to people who treat them with friendliness and compassion. That’s all they ask.”

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