posted 08-25-2005 03:47 PM               

I'll give it a shot but pics would be a HUGE help, you can email me at matt@spaceracemuseum.com and I'll take a look this weekend.

So first things first - you've got a Mercury silver spacesuit! Am I jealous? Hell, no

What's it worth? The basic answer is - it depends. From your description parts of the suit (maybe all of it?) are mock-ups rather than flight or training hardware. The extent to which this is the case will help determine the value.
Similarly if your suit is a prototype it could well effect value; for example the flight model of the Apollo suit (the A7L) is generally more valuable than it's immediate predecessor the A6L. The nearer your suit is to the flown configuration the more valuable it will be.
Condition will also be a factor, you mention some rot and rips which will obviously knock off some more value.

To give you an example of how hard it is to put a definite price tag on your suit - I bought an old spacesuit myself this year from the same era as yours, a very early version of the Apollo suit. It's very beaten up (much worse than yours from the description), lacks helmet and gloves, and looks very different to the flown suits. I got it for $1,500.

In 2000 a cosmetically superb Mercury silver spacesuit sold at auction for $90,000 despite lacking the inner pressure suit.

Breathe slowly. In... and out.

That was a pretty good price though, probably not one to rely on matching even if you had an identical suit.

I'll hazard some very conservative guesses.

If your suit is a vintage mock up made by Goodrich then I'd say the low estimate has to be $5,000

If it's a mixture of real suit and mock-up then low estimate $8,000

My high estimates would between to 3 to 5 times those figures, maybe more with two determined bidders. The degree to which it looks like the suit we all know from the Mercury 7 photos is probably your biggest decider of value.

I'd like to see it, please send me the pics.

Hope this helps,
Matt

posted 08-25-2005 07:20 PM               

I am interested in the coins you have. you can send a picture of the suit and the coins, patches etc. to Robert at

contact@collectspace.com

and he will post of your pictures.

posted 08-26-2005 04:04 PM               

It's hard to be definitive from photos but my first impressions are -

The entire suit is a mock-up, and not a particularly accurate one I'm afraid. The look of the silver material is too shiny; the gloves are very simplistic; there's no visible sign of wrist or helmet locking-rings, or chest connectors.

If you look at the pages I've linked below you can find plenty of images of the suits to make comparisons with.

http://images.ksc.nasa.gov/photos/1961/1961-sheet-01.html
http://images.ksc.nasa.gov/photos/1962/1962-sheet-01.html
http://images.ksc.nasa.gov/photos/1963/1963-sheet-01.html

ID tags tend to be found in the helmet, the gloves, the neck and possibly the boots. If you find any tags please post the details and I'll try and find out if they correspond to genuine Goodrich tags.
If the suit isn't by Goodrich then I really don't know what it would fetch on the market; it would effectively be a reproduction rather than a mock-up. With it's age and the link to Von Braun it could still be of interest to some suit collectors.

Just as a matter of interest I've included a photo below of another mock-up that originated from Huntsville for the Apollo suit. The style of the two dummies are certainly in keeping with each other.

Cheers,
Matt

posted 08-26-2005 06:20 PM              

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Scott Schneeweis