Two Slightly Used Space Suits For Sale 60
cylonlover writes "More space history will go on sale in New York on May 5 when Bonhams will commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Alan Shepard's historic mission in Freedom 7 with a Space Sale. Some early highlights of the sale include a Sokol K spacesuit worn by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov during the historic 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Project (the symbolic end to the Space Race) and a Sokol KV-2 spacesuit worn by Gennadi Strekalov during a 1990 mission to the Mir space station."
Re:Pretty sweet deal! (Score:5, Informative)
But a pissed-in suit would be perfectly appropriate for the 50th anniversary of Shepard's flight.
While lying on his back for hours waiting for his 15-minute flight, he had to relieve himself into his suit. After that incident, NASA started putting urine collection bags into the spacesuits.
Re:I'd rather celebrate the first *man* in space (Score:4, Informative)
Kids are putting stuff almost into orbit now.
weatherbaloon + digital camera + GPS equiped phone flying below 20 miles != orbit, hell, it doesnt even qualify as space by any reasonable definition
Landing a man on the moon, and bringing him back in one piece? That's a little harder. I mean, there must be an order or 5 of magnitude difference between the two otherwise the Russians would have ticked that one off the list too, right?
The russians WERE working on that quite hard, but political infighting between seperate teams proposing different heavy lift rockets, combined with them picking a slightly problematic design for the actual launcher (the N1 had 30 engines just for its first stage), which produced four unsuccesfull test launches, before the US actually planted their flag on the moon, pretty much killed the russians in the race to put a man on the moon.
Basically, they gambled on the wrong design and lost
Re: Average American (Score:4, Informative)
Well, for a while it was Un-American to know info about Russian stuff.
Even more so, the Russians filtered everything and propagandized what was released through the iron curtain. It wasn't even until the 1980s that people had a chance to really learn the history of the Russian space program.
And according to recent books and documentaries by Nova, some of that isn't truly accurate either.