It's a blast from the space militarization past, as a couple of security guys stumble onto a pair of forgotten MOL spacesuits:

Two security officers were doing a check of the Launch Complex 5/6 museum, the former blockhouse from where the first American manned space flight was controlled. NASA Special Agent Dann E. Oakland and Henry Butler, Security Manager for Delaware North Parks and Resorts, discovered a locked room -- and they did not have a key.

Using a master key for the facility, the locked door was eventually opened. With no power, the room had evidently not been in use by people in many years. The officers used flashlights to explore the room and make their find.

Apparently, there was a lot of old film inside, which was deteriorated and deemed a fire hazard. The article doesn't specify what happened to it, though, or what was on it or whether it was recoverable. (Thanks for the tease, Space.com.)

Besides the film, Oakland and Butler found the two blue spacesuits "complete and in remarkable shape," as they were described by the suits' manufacturer who examined them.

"The suits were stored in their original shipping container with extra sets of gloves of various sizes," described Oakland. "The inside of the container's lid had the holder for the flight data files and a hand painted NASA logo."

This reminds me of a tale I heard back in the early nineties, at a lecture by a guy who had been some sort of IT expert at the Pentagon. He claimed that, during a network upgrade in the 1980s, he noticed something peculiar on one of the original blueprints of the building -- it showed a door into an office, where there was no door in reality. He and his partner checked the offices on both sides, to see if the hallway door had been closed off and replaced by an door to an adjoining office, but there were no other doors. They obtained permission, and broke through the wall where the door should have been...and found an ordinary office inside, outfitted with unused desks, (dead) phone, and other office equipment dating from the 1940s, which had been inadvertently sealed off at some point between the time the building was completed and when it was occupied. The Pentagon being as large as it is, the "lost" office went unnoticed for forty-odd years. (Sounds like an urban legend, but I don't see it listed at Snopes.)

Another thing this reminds me of, more relevant to NASA, is the "discovery" of a set of F-1 and J-1 engines (five each) at Michoud Assembly Facility in 2001. They had been sitting in a crib in a disused pressure test cell for thirty years, covered with plastic tarp and protected (laughably, given the New Orleans climate) with numerous bags of dessicant. A lot of people at Michoud knew the engines were there (I stumbled on them myself in 1999), but apparently NASA did not -- from what I heard at the time, an inventory of all F-1 engines in storage and museums conducted during the late 1980s (for possible use on a large booster, either Shuttle-C or ALS/NLS, I forget which) missed these units. Once "discovered", they were promptly loaded onto flatbeds and hauled off to Marshall, with at least one of each engine going (word has it) to the Smithsonian.

Posted by T.L. James on June 5, 2005 08:15 PM