Hi. I'm in Delaware.

Today I returned home from a business trip to Delaware, which means that after a solid 28 years without ever visiting the First State I have now been there twice in one month. Alas, there were no gay beaches to be visited this time- I was there to meet with ILC Dover about a pressure seal for one of my programs. Here's what I knew about the company before I got there this morning: they make pressure seals. I quickly found out that they make quite a lot more, and do you know what their bread and butter is? Making spaces suits for NASA!

Since our meeting finished up around lunchtime, a couple of the employees asked up if we'd like a tour of their facility, and you'd better believe I did. The first stop was the ILC Museum where they kept several space-type items- historical space suit pieces, autographed astronaut pictures, exhibits showing the suit's composition, etc. Apparently they have a lot of pieces that they loan to various museums and they keep them here between trips. For instance, John Young's suit had just returned from a museum in New Zealand.

The ILC museum was pretty nifty in itself, but the next stop was the space suit test lab. Now, I go to a lot of museums, so I've seen actual space suits before. But this was the first time I've been allowed to walk right up to them and twist knobs, move them around, and take pieces apart. Well, maybe not so much "allowed to" as "not stopped from." They had an old Apollo era suit in one corner, and a couple of the newest models set up for testing. While I didn't get to put on a suit or anything (that probably would've been pushing it), I did get to mess with them. My main impression? They are heavy. Apparently they weigh over 200 pounds, and that's without life support. In fact, since it's so hard to stand around in them (they are designed for zero gravity) they actually hang testers from a winch in the ceiling during evaluations. The lucky souls are suspended in front of this panel of hardware that's loaded with various knobs, screws, levers and whatnot to try to replicate whatever they may encounter during spacewalks. It ends up looking like the adult version of those baby play things that you lay kids under with all the lights and rattles. In any case, it seems that a lot of the weight comes from the bearings at every point of articulation, of which there are many. Plus, there's a lot of attachment hardware- I understand that the biggest difference between the space race suits and the new models is that the current ones are very modular. Whereas the Apollo suits were completely custom made for each astronaut, now they just make 5 or 6 different sizes of everything and piece together a good fit. The only thing that's still custom is the gloves, and I'll get to that in a minute.

Being that the suits were custom, all astronauts used to travel to the Dover facility to get sized/fitted. I guess while they were there it was customary to walk around the building and shake hands with the employees- hence alot of the older guys have their pictures with guys like Neil Armstrong or Eugene Cernan. This was either a nice goodwill gesture by the astronauts, or they wanted to make sure the regular joes protecting them from the cold vacuum of space were personally invested in the quality of their work. Anyway, now they just measure hands for custom gloves. Apparently they tried to make due with 9 standard sizes, but it didn't prove to be sufficient- one of the guys said that Jerry Ross had "hands like a bear." So now they size them all with some special hand scanner that's so accurate it even shows the hair. We actually got to go into the glove lab while workers were stitching away. They let me (I did ask first) try on an in-process glove, and it fit (dare I say) like a glove, which is apparently pretty rare for something so custom. The name wasn't on them yet, but they were for Astronaut 6GH, whoever that is. It seems I have the hands of an astronaut, if nothing else.

Believe it or not, they said they frequently get calls from people who want to buy their own Space Suit, or a child-sized one for their kid's birthday- which they don't really do, because these things cost millions of dollars. However, since people are willing to pay ungodly sums to get N*SYNC or Peyton Manning* to come to little princess's super sweet 16, I think anything's possible. The other neat thing they had in another lab was a Russian cosmonaut suit, which they were studying to see what they could learn from the other perspective. Evidently the Russian suits are a lot lighter and more compact, mostly because they are designed with a much lower safety factor- it seems that they value speed and value over personal safety, which also presents itself in their aircraft design. And where did ILC Dover get a Russian space suit? From- and I kid you not- eBay.

The other fun product that they make in Dover is LTA, or Lighter Than Air aircraft. Blimps. Big ones. They had a huge hanger-like area where several people pieced together giant hunks of various polymers to form all manner of airships, from the unmanned surveillance aerostats the Army is using in Iraq and Afghanistan to the commercial airships you see at football games. In fact, other than the Goodyear blimps (which are made by, well, Goodyear) ILC makes every other modern blimp you can think of (or at least the blimp part). That includes the Metlife Snoopy Blimps, the Budweiser Blimp, and my new personal favorite, Bloomin' Onion I.

All in all, what appeared to be an ordinary day of meetings turned out to be surprisingly amusing (and educational). I'll close with a quote one of the guys relayed from the company president when talking about the space suit boots (which they made). He said "Every time I see one of those glorious pictures of the footprints on the moon, I think 'why didn't we put the company logo on there?'" I guess it's better as is, because something like this could've really cheapened the whole thing.

* I make that reference because Ramya knows someone who had Peyton Manning at her sweet 16 party. But, as I told her, all the money he gets from appearances goes to his charity. Also, Cedric the Entertainer was there.