secret magazine no. 21
Most people won't recognize these, but this was the original zero-g simulation rig used for the mercury astronauts. When people think of zero-g training these days they usually think of those omnidirectional training seats, or perhaps the "vomit comet" (big plane that simulates zero g by flying up and down in big oscillations) but before all that fancy tech, they had to make do with a carefully tuned set of springs that had to be calibrated separately for every astronaut. They would use the air lines to test decision making and cognative function in simulated zero-g by altering the percentage of oxygen in the air mix, causing brain fog, fatigue, confusion, and sometimes even blackouts to make sure astronauts could recover quickly. By the time of the Apollo program, these rigs had been phased out in favor of much better generalized training systems that used the experiences of the mercury astronauts to create far more realistic simulations of working and flying in low gravity environments, and sadly none of the original suits survived to this day, so these photos are all we have of them.
