To boldly go where no wives or kids can follow.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Artifact - Spacesuit replica - Brief article

THIS EERIE youth-sized spacesuit, on display at the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center in northern Virginia, is actually a nonfunctional replica of what the big-boy Mercury astronauts wore. It was whipped up as part of an early 1960s publicity campaign by the fire maker BF Goodrich. Despite the popularity at the time of the TV series Lost in Space (reportedly John Kennedy Jr.'s favorite show as a tyke), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) never seriously considered launching a family into orbit. Space might have been the New Frontier, but in the early days of manned flight, there never seemed to be quite enough room for the wife and kids.

The mid-century model of space exploration thus updated the misconception that the...