I love stuff like this.Some of the many fine little artifacts on display here... Lunar Module manuals. Note the thickness of the guidance sustem "study guide"- I wonder what the total weight of all the paper checklists and manuals was aboard those Apollo flights...
This is Command Module 002, built by Rockwell in California and flown unmanned atop a "Little Joe" in 1966 to test the "escape tower", the rocket on the nose of the Saturn spacecraft designed to pull the CM and its crew safely away from a malfunctioning booster. It worked fine, and the system was never needed on any manned flight. The parachutes displayed here were recovered with Apollo 15's CM- they've been to lunar orbit and back.
A proposal for a surface EVA suit... LOL!! Even in low gravity, this would've been a disaster. Looks pretty top-heavy...and how they'd exit and enter the LM in this thing is anybody's guess. They had enough trouble as it was with the suits and packs that were used...
But at one time, nobody knew for sure if astronauts would be able to successfully walk around on the Moon. This must've been a very early proposal...
Coming up: The day continues at Floyd Bennett Field!