Gus Grissom' Suit

Gus's surviving family and NASA have never really gotten on. Now a 15 year old girl has weighed in to their dispute.

MADISON, Conn. -- A 15-year-old girl with a Web site, a summer of free time and an astronaut for a hero is trying to resolve a three-year-old dispute over the fate of one of NASA's earliest space suits.

The family of pioneering astronaut Gus Grissom has been trying for years to get NASA to give them his 1961 Mercury space suit. NASA says the suit is government property and a valuable artifact that should be kept at the Astronaut Hall of Fame in Florida.
Enter Amanda Meyer, a Madison teenager, space enthusiast and co-captain of the Daniel Hand High School debate team. She believes she has a compromise and, after launching an Internet petition drive, she has spent the summer writing and calling NASA, the Smithsonian Institution, Congress and anyone else she can think of.

Meyer says the government doesn't have to give up its claim to the suit but should loan it to the Gus Grissom Memorial, a museum in his hometown of Mitchell, Ind.

"It just seems fair," Meyer said. "It should be in his museum because that's where he would want it."

There has been long-standing tension between Grissom's wife, Betty, and NASA since Grissom and two other Apollo 1 astronauts, Roger Chaffee and Edward White, died in a 1967 command module fire during a training exercise. The space agency, she feels, ignored her and her family after the tragedy, even as it honored the crews of Challenger and Columbia.

Grissom wore the space suit during his Mercury mission, in which his spacecraft safely landed in the ocean but sank after a hatch prematurely blew. Grissom escaped and said the hatch malfunctioned. But some, including author Tom Wolfe in his book "The Right Stuff," suggested he panicked and blew the hatch early.

After the Mercury mission, Grissom took the suit home and never returned it, NASA said. Family members have said he rescued it from the trash, a contention NASA denies. In 1989, Betty Grissom lent the suit to the privately run Astronaut Hall of Fame. But in 2003, after the government took over the museum, she and her son, Scott, tried to get the suit back.

NASA agreed to return 15 items, including a flight log and his commemorative medals, but refused to return the suit, saying it was government property belonging to the Smithsonian.

Meyer heard about the dispute in February, after she sent Scott Grissom a copy of a school essay she wrote about his father. When Scott Grissom called, Amanda's mother was so excited, she pulled Amanda out of school to return the call. Since that call, Meyer has worked to get the space suit moved.

"Gus Grissom is my hero," Meyer said. "I'd like to see his memory commemorated the way it should be."

Scott Grissom did not return phone messages seeking comment.

As the school year waned, she pledged to spend summer on the issue. Through her Web site and petition drives outside a local grocery store, she says she has collected about 2,000 signatures calling for the suit to be moved to Indiana.

"She's persistent," said NASA spokesman George H. Diller.

It's not the first time Amanda has thrown herself at an issue, said her mother, Carolyn Meyer. She raised money for a local no-kill animal shelter, worked on a state representative's campaign and, after growing out her hair to the point she could sit on it, she abruptly cut it off and donated it to make wigs for cancer patients.

Her Grissom petition has become fodder for space-related Web logs and message boards. Some admire her drive; others say she's being used in the Grissoms' dispute with NASA.

A representative from the Delaware North Companies, the government contractor that operates the Astronaut Hall of Fame, was to meet with Meyer this week but the company said only the Smithsonian can transfer artifacts.

"Amanda Meyer is a nice young lady, and as well meaning as she is, she's a third party in this," said Roger Launius, chairman of space history at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

At the end of the year, the space suit's fate will be reconsidered, NASA said. The space agency plans to ask the Smithsonian to keep it in Florida. Meyer hopes she can convince the Smithsonian to move it to Indiana.

And I thought we had the right stuff. :) Go Girl.