Slashdot Mirror
Historical Look at Pressure Suits
Ant writes to tell us about an interesting site that takes a look at the history of space suits. There is a pretty comprehensive look at space suit design from 1935 to present across all nations. An interesting tour of our progress towards exploration of the unknown. From the article: "The first full pressure suit was made by an English firm for the American balloonist Mark Ridge. The suit was taken to 17 torr (25.6 km) pressurized to 11.1 km. The English broke two world records with the Mark Ridge Suit in 1935."
The summary is correct. How could 11.1 km == 25.6 km?!?
What it means is; 17 torr ~ 2.3 kPa which probably is the pressure at 25.5 km (as indicated by this table.)
Look a monkey!
I think it means they took it to 25.6km where the pressure is 17 torr and the suit was preasurised to the equivilent of 11.1km. It's badly worded, but that's the only interrpretation I can think of that makes sense.
Also check out http://www.globaleffects.com/B_02_frameset.html for some more picks of real and prop suites.
It's a wonderful site on anything involving historical space exploration and rocketry. I've been going there for years. I have a lot of these wonderful historical sites. These are quasi-related:
t s/
http://www.astronautix.com/
The home page of this site.
http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.com/
A site on the history of nuclear weaponry.
http://www.fas.org/
The Federation of American Scientists. Look on the left menu for links to weapons, rockets, missiles...
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplane
The Nine Planets - A site about our solar system.
Every time I find a good historical site, I add it to my collection. Wikipedia.org just goes without saying.