[FPSPACE] Gus Grissom Spacesuit fracas

[wayneday]

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Astronaut's widow fights NASA 
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By Laurin Sellers
Sentinel Staff Writer

November 19, 2002

TITUSVILLE -- For the past decade, Virgil "Gus" Grissom's Mercury 7 spacesuit 
has hung in a glass case at the Astronaut Hall of Fame.

Now his 75-year-old widow, who has long blamed NASA for the 1967 Apollo I 
launchpad fire that killed her husband and two other astronauts, says she 
plans 
to get it back today -- "even if it takes a hammer and a saw to get it."

"I don't want NASA making money off Gus Grissom artifacts," said Betty 
Grissom, 
who once sued the manufacturer of the Apollo capsule and over the years has 
maintained that NASA covered up what she calls the "murder" of her husband.

But National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials said Monday that 
the 
suit, which Grissom wore on his suborbital flight in 1961, belongs to the 
space 
agency. Gus Grissom, they said, checked it out in the 1960s for show and tell 
at 
one of his son's classes and never returned it.

In a Nov. 8 letter from NASA to Delaware North Parks Services, which recently 
took over the Astronaut Hall of Fame, the space agency wrote that the 
"spacesuit, boots, gloves and helmet worn by Virgil I. 'Gus' Grissom are the 
sole property of the U.S. Government and that Delaware North should not 
release 
these items to any parties without written direction from NASA."

NASA spokesman Robert Mirelson said the agency hasn't decided where the 
spacesuit will be displayed.

That isn't stopping Betty Grissom and her eldest son, Scott, who planned to be 
at the defunct Hall of Fame this afternoon to collect the items they lent the 
museum in 1991 -- a watch, a patch, a cowboy hat, the folded American flag 
from 
the fallen astronaut's funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, and the 
spacesuit.

The Grissoms decided to retrieve the property after the private, 
not-for-profit 
museum was taken over earlier this year by Delaware North, which also has a 
contract with NASA to run the visitor center tourist attraction at Kennedy 
Space 
Center. Delaware North has temporarily closed the Hall of Fame for remodeling.

Gus Grissom's family doesn't dispute that he took the suit, along with the 
helmet, shoes and gloves, for show and tell. But they said the astronaut 
decided 
to keep it after learning NASA planned to destroy it.

After her husband's death, Betty Grissom kept the spacesuit, hanging it in the 
closet of her Houston home.

There it stayed for another 24 years until Betty Grissom was contacted by Hall 
of Fame officials about lending some of her husband's effects to the museum, 
which went out of business earlier this year.

The Grissom family was willing to go along with the request because the Hall 
of 
Fame was independent of NASA and devoted a portion of its proceeds toward 
scholarships.

"We put this suit in the museum for a good reason, to help with the astronaut 
scholarship program," said Scott Grissom. He thinks that NASA and Delaware 
North 
now want the spacesuit just to turn a profit.

"It's wrong," said Scott Grissom, who has conducted his own investigation into 
his father's death.

Gus Grissom has long been one of the U.S. space program's most tragic heroes.

Grissom's brief Mercury flight 41 years ago was marred when the hatch on his 
Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft inexplicably blew off and the capsule sank. It was 
salvaged from the ocean floor in 1999.

In 1967, Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee died inside their Apollo 1 
capsule while training for the moon program's first mission. The men were 
trapped inside after a spark ignited pure oxygen, causing a flash fire.

Betty Grissom has remained active in the space community since her husband's 
death, often signing commemorative certificates in his place and, for a time, 
serving on the Hall of Fame's board. She resigned when the museum refused to 
admit Chaffee because he had never flown in space.

But another Mercury 7 astronaut, Wally Schirra, on Monday disputed Betty 
Grissom's claims, saying she has become increasingly bitter through the years 
and that NASA never intended to destroy her husband's spacesuit.

"NASA has not destroyed one suit that I know of," he said.

Schirra said he and other astronauts were surprised when they learned the 
family 
had the spacesuit.

"None of us were ever given our spacesuits," he said.

"That suit belongs to NASA."

The Grissom family has hired Melbourne attorney Jim Fallace.

NASA officials said they intend to return all of Gus Grissom's other artifacts 
to the family today.

Howard Benedict, executive director of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, 
which has been a consultant to the Hall of Fame, said officials will meet the 
Grissoms outside the Hall of Fame this afternoon.

But the Grissoms said they aren't giving up until they also get the spacesuit.

"It doesn't belong to Delaware North or NASA or the Hall of Fame," Scott 
Grissom 
said. "I dropped it off there over 10 years ago, and I intend to pick it up."





























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