Lt. Clifton McClure wore this partial pressure suit for his 1958 Man High III flight, while he rode in a sealed gondola lifted by a balloon. The suit is displayed at the New Mexico Museum of Space History. To show how preservation of such artifacts was not foremost, the museum was told that McClure s son used to wear this suit for Halloween. (Michael Shinabery/For the Daily News)Alamogordo, MN – Rocket a man into space? How will you protect him above the atmosphere?
 
NASA issued “specifications for the Mercury pressure suit” in October 1959, according to NASA’s “Project Mercury: A Chronology” (1963). The first phase would produce “operational research suits which could be used for astronaut training, system evaluation and further suit development”; the second phase would be the “Mercury pressure suits in the final configuration.”
 
The Cold War-era Space Race didn’t invent the spacesuit. Eleven years earlier, in the March 1948 Astounding Science Fiction, L. Sprague de Camp pondered its history.
 
“The earliest fictional use of a space suit that I know of occurred in Arthur Train’s ‘The Moon Maker,’ which appeared in Cosmopolitan (magazine) during World War I,” de Camp wrote. “In the course of their expedition in a spaceship of the flying-ring type to demolish a runaway planetoid threatening the Earth, the characters of Train’s story land on the moon to replace their fuel unit, which they do in space suits.”
 
However, de Camp said, “Long before Train’s story, men realized the need for protection and an oxygen supply in order to explore the upper air.” British balloonists/aeronauts Henry Coxwell and Dr. James Glaisher, also a meteorologist, learned this when, on Sept. 5, 1862, they ascended 5.5 miles.
 
“Glaisher lost consciousness, while Coxwell saved them by opening the relief valve with his teeth” in order to descend. Coxwell’s hands, nearly frozen, were useless, said the website fly.historicwings.com.
 
Space history: Mercury astronauts suit up