posted 03-16-2019 07:05 PM               

The principal subject that they had here at the Manned Spacecraft Center at that time was a fellow by the name of Jackie [D.] Mays. Jackie was doing most of the chamber tests. He was a parachute rigger in the Navy, so he was pretty versed in working around pressure suits.

...Jackie [D.] Mays is another guy that you should interview. He did a lot of this test subject work before I ever got here. He was the principal test subject and probably the most knowledgeable guy of all.

I remember that since no one else wanted to do these things, that I got to be a test subject. They had a professional test subject, Jackie [Mays]. I can't think of his name now. Jackie — big, strapping, tough guy. I was a scrawny little runt. One of the deals was, space suits were rare and expensive, and so, you know, you didn't make space suits for the test subjects. You made space suits for flight crews, and then the test subjects would try to find the one that was closest to the right size.

Nothing fit me, and so I had Frank Borman's suit. Frank Borman and I are not the same size in any dimension, and it was really miserable in there. Old Jackie would help me. He was teaching me the ropes, being a test subject. So we got to be pretty good friends. As I learned more about it, I started getting involved in writing some of the test programs, since we built this. We sort of designed the requirements and the system together, then we kind of wrote the test program. It was just, just really fascinating.

Yes, we routinely used other test subjects. There weren't many of them. One that I know the best is a guy by the name of Jack [Jackie D.] Mays. I don't know if you've ever interviewed him, but you might consider it. First of all I should say that in the Apollo program every astronaut had his own space suit. Matter of fact, most of them had three. The flight astronauts had a flight suit, they had a backup flight suit, and they had a training suit.

The life support systems were separable, so we didn't have life support systems assigned by name but ultimately only one life support system went with an astronaut to the Moon because they didn't come back. Jack Mays was the only person that I know who had his own space suit, only person who wasn't an astronaut who had his own space suit with his name on it. He did that many vacuum chamber training runs. There was another fellow that did some work over in the Space Environment Simulation Laboratory, guy by the name of [Kenneth] Ken Dessert, who I still know today. He hasn't worked at NASA for decades, but I do run into him at church occasionally. But Jack Mays was the guy that did most of the "guinea pig" type runs to make sure that this stuff was going to work okay.

posted 03-17-2019 04:33 AM               

And this is Mattingly in Borman's suit during a PLSS flight unit verification test in the MSC altitude chamber on June 24, 1968. This was part of the LTA-8 vacuum chamber tests.

posted 03-17-2019 06:10 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Rolf:
Bill Ayrey of ILC Dover can help.

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