Hello Everyone,

The other day I had the special opportunity to examine the high altitude pressure suits not on exhibit at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. This was thru the museum's registrar Christine Runte (white vest) and her assistant Kathrine Browne (purple shirt) posing next to me in the first snap shot.

This was a very productive opportunity as I it took something like 65 images and several pages of notes. The first suit I examined was the SR-71 David Clark PPA suit. This suit is in the tree of spacesuits evolution between the Gemini and STS-1 suits (and thus the current Space Shuttle ACES). Though they wouldn't let me take the orange (nomex?) coveralls completely off I did get a close look at the Link-Net restraint layer and pressure bladder. Plus the wrist rings and neckring assemblies. The Neckring assembly was exactly like the Gemini system.

But, the most exciting piece was the BFG Mark III pressure suit that was in the acid free box in the left hand of the snap shot above. It was BF Goodrich suit circa 1956 and a generation before the Mercury suits!

A truly amazing chance to touch spacesuit/pressure suit history with white gloves on of course! I should have taken a picture of the gloves afterward. They were amazingly dirty!

The other two images are of the SR-71 suit and BFG (Mark III?). I gave Christine a copy of US Space Gear for her reference library (shown to the right in the second suit image below). This all happened because I'm with NSS Seattle which is part of the Museum's extended family (it helps that I'm a current member of the Museum as well).