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Forum:	Hardware & Flown Items
Topic:	Cooper's Project Mercury Helmet

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Your Reply: HTML is ON UBB Code is ON Smilies Legend	[QUOTE]Originally posted by gikev: [B]That's a very good point. I should have posted all of my research on eBay but there is a limit of 12 photographs. And I didn't think it was necessary to post more photos here to make my case. But for the sake of making a more comprehensive presentation I will post a composite of the three helmets used by Cooper for his Mercury training and flight. From what I have learned, the Mercury astronauts were issued 3 helmets each for their flights. A training unit, a backup, and a flight helmet. In the case of Cooper improvements were made to the mercury helmet which were later implemented on his MA-9 flight. All mercury astronauts flying orbital and sub-orbital flights up until MA-9 wore helmets with a pressurized gas sealed visor. Beginning with Cooper's flight and continuing through the entire Gemini program all crews wore mechanical visor sealed helmets (I'm not sure about the Borman/Lovell mission). What that boils down to is, Cooper started out with a gas sealed training helmet and then finished out the mercury program using a mechanical visor back up and flight helmet. In my composite I show all three helmets. <center><img src="http://collectspace.com/review/mercuryhelmetvariations.jpg" WIDTH="480"></center> The early gas sealed helmet is easy enough to tell apart from the other two. But the two mechanical visor helmets differ enough from each other to differentiate them as well. My guess is that the back up is either in the NASM archives or in Huntsville. As for the photo of Cooper, it was taken April 30, 1963, 15 days before his mission. Here is the description from the GRIN website: <BLOCKQUOTE>Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper in white room, waiting for Terminal Countdown Demonstrations Test (TCDT) activities to resume in preparation for his Mercury-Atlas 9 launch.</BLOCKQUOTE>[/B][/QUOTE]
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