For better or worse, a small piece of the Apollo 11 spacecraft will now belong to Jon Mesick and remain for life.
this Gold hot polyimide tapeIt accompanied the first astronauts to the moon in 1969 and is now the centerpiece of Mesick custom wedding rings made by Honest Hands Rings Company in Morrison, Colorado. The ring also incorporates lunar elements meteoriteis the focus of a newly released online video that highlights the importance of the ring and demonstrates how it is made.
“We’ve made thousands of rings before, but never anything this rare,” said Ben Bosworth. Honest Hands Rings Ltd. owner. “That was the most stressful part we’ve ever done.”
Messick wants a piece of the action Apollo 11 The mission embedded in his ring stems in part from his job as a planning manager for Lockheed Martin. The aerospace company is one of NASA’s prime contractors artemis projectproviding the Orion spacecraft, currently planned Return the first astronauts to the moon For over 50 years.
Related: The Apollo Project: How NASA put astronauts on the moon
The Mylar-like fly-to-the-moon foil was acquired at auction. The 9-inch (23-centimetre) piece traces its legacy to a NASA production control engineer who led the machine shop responsible for preparing artifacts for museum display and memorabilia for distribution to space agency officials, employees and others.
“This is much bigger than I need to make the ring, but I’m going to fit it in [the remainder] In my house. This is something I will always cherish,” Messick said. Denver 7 interviewan ABC News affiliate.
peel back history
The Apollo 11 spacecraft consisted of two spacecraft: the command module “Columbia” and the lunar module “Eagle”. Left over from the early days In lunar orbit with astronaut Michael Collins And the Eagle landed at Tranquility Base with the Moonwalker Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
Columbia’s exterior is covered with aluminized laminate. The outer layer of the tape is silver to reflect sunlight, while the underlying layer is gold to exclude radiation. Both help regulate the temperature of the command module during its journey from Earth to Earth. moon Then come back.
When Columbia returned, the intense heat generated during reentry caused some of the tape to burn. After splashing into the sea and being hoisted aboard a ship and brought back to shore, the flaking golden film became an attractive target for recovery team members to easily take as a souvenir.
Jim McDivitt, astronaut and Apollo spacecraft project manager, wrote in an October 1969 memo: “There have been numerous instances of unauthorized removal of equipment… including the removal of polyimide heat. “I would like to point out to everyone involved that this unauthorized removal of equipment, no matter how small it may appear, constitutes a breach of our responsibilities. “
Still, even as the command module arrived at its post-flight processing facility, technicians were instructed Peel off large pieces of tape to allow inspection of the underlying hardware. by the time Colombia delivered In 1971, the Smithsonian Institution discovered that the reflective film left only a very small trace.
“Never exist again”
Haydn Coats, head of manufacturing at Honest Hands, began making the Messick ring by machining a zirconium strip carved with internal channels and lined with pebbles from the moon.
Moon rocks collected by Apollo astronauts Considered a national treasure. No one has ever been given such an opportunity. However, there are other lunar fragments that fell to Earth as meteorites, and they can be bought and sold legally. The lunar meteorite in the Messick Ring was discovered in Algeria in 2022.
“It came from the moon,” Coates said, “just so we could crush it and put it into this customer’s ring.”
Once the lunar meteorite gravel was in place, attention turned to carefully cutting a strip of tape from the Apollo 11 flight and setting it into the ring.
“It feels like something between aluminum foil and high-tech aluminum foil,” Coates said. “It’s super light. There’s nothing there.”
“It all comes down to this moment, getting ready to cut out a piece of NASA and American history,” Bosworth said. “I think that’s definitely the most valuable thing. [we’ve] Cut before.
Other rings made by Honest Hands include bands containing vinyl records, arcade tokens and World Series field dirt.
“Customer rings are always stressful, but the fact that this was an Apollo 11 space flight Kapton won at auction, a super valuable material that will never exist again, is what makes this ring so special. Reason,” Bosworth said.
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