Grissom Spacesuit in Tug of War

Can a 15-year-old end an enduring dispute between the government and the family of an astronaut who met a tragic fate?

Amanda Meyer of Madison, Conn., is about to find out.

Through letters, phone calls and an Internet petition, the high school sophomore is waging a campaign to get federal officials to relinquish control of a spacesuit worn by astronaut Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom during a 15-minute suborbital flight in the Liberty Bell 7 capsule in 1961. Grissom, picked to be one of NASA's original seven Mercury astronauts in 1959, died in a fire aboard Apollo 1 during a launchpad test on Jan. 27, 1967. His family wants to keep his suit from the earlier mission.

"I'm going to keep working until the suit is handed over," said Amanda, who began the effort in February after learning about Grissom while researching a school essay on heroism. She said federal officials "should do the honorable thing and help this fallen hero's family."

Her goal is simple. Achieving it is not.

The suit, which is on display at the Astronaut Hall of Fame near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, has been the focus of a long tug of war between Grissom's family and the national space agency.

Family members say Grissom rescued the suit from the scrap heap in 1961 and brought it home, where it hung in a closet with his wife's clothing for nearly 30 years. In 1990, they lent it and other artifacts to the Hall of Fame, then a privately run museum in Titusville, Fla.

After the museum was taken over by a NASA contractor in 2002, the Grissoms wanted their part of the collection back. The family was able to retrieve Grissom's watch, a cowboy hat, a patch and an American flag, but NASA refused to hand over the spacesuit.

"They are just a bunch of thieves," Betty Grissom, 78, the astronaut's widow, said in an interview from her home in Houston. "I've been disgusted and dismayed. You think the government is proper people, and they're not. "

U.S. officials have a different view.

NASA records indicate that Grissom signed the suit out in 1965 to take it to a show-and-tell event for his children and never brought it back, said Roger D. Launius, chairman of the space history division at the National Air and Space Museum here. (The museum is part of the Smithsonian Institution, which acquired the suit from NASA in 2003.)

"Nobody ever really went back to try to get it," Launius said. "Our position would be that it is, and always has been, government property. . . . We're not going to give it to anybody."