Neil Armstrong - first man on the moon (1969)

Portrait of Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing mission in his space suit, with his helmet on the table in front of him. Behind him is a large photograph of the lunar surface.

Neil doing his thing

 

 

Steve

Windak Suits (1962)

A very British Astronaut...

This is the High-Altitude Windak Pressure Suit developed in 1962 by Baxter, Woodhouse and Taylor Ltd. to fulfil R.A.F. requirements.  The suit was constructed from a single layer of gas tight rubberised silk bonded to strong cotton. It was internally pressurised by air in order to achieve a higher pressure upon the wearer's body than naturally occurs at very high altitudes and beyond.

And if Britain had have got to all of those German rocket scientist after the war instead of the Americans and the Russian then we would have gone into space most probably dressed like this.

Alas it wasn't to be, and our own attempts at a getting a man into orbit never really got off the drawing board, let alone the ground, and so these suits were eventually retired having never had the chance to become all that they might have been.

Except.....

Steve

Grumman Moon Suit (1962)

Come in number 3, your time  is up!

This is, or was, the Grumman Moon Suit as it appeared in Life Magazine, April 1962. Now as goofy and impractical as this appears to be it must have impressed somebody over at NASA because in the November of that same year The Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation became the chief contractor working on the Apollo Lunar Module. An equally eccentric yet much more successfully designed piece of space hardware; the ALM genuinely made it all the way to the lunar surface just 6 years and 9 months later. The Grumman Moon Suit, however, only got to pretend, faking it here in the Mojave Desert, California.

And that would have been the end of things except that something very much like this design appeared as part of the very popular and fondly remembered Major Matt Mason toy line.

These space based action figures and accessories waxed and waned in parallel with the general public’s interest in the real moon missions.  So in a way, fuelled by the imaginations of children high on that very first moon landing in July 1969, the Moon Suit most probably fulfilled its destiny any amount of times thereafter..... whilst never actually leaving the living room carpet.

Steve