Astronaut Press Meeting, Lewis Research Center, March 4, 1960

This is a piece of ephemera I found. It looks like a souvenir of a press event with the Mercury astronauts at the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland Ohio.

"Astronaut Press Meeting, Lewis Research Center, March 4, 1960." 12 p.

It is a spiral-bound thick board-book with reproductions of photographs and some news article that covered the event.

 Mostly it was a chance for reporters to see the astronauts and report on the bio-medical testing they were undergoing.

"Perhaps the most impressive simulator, the whirligig called MASTIF (for Multiple Axis Space Test Inertia Facility), located at Lewis' cavernous altitude wind tunnel, was publicized far beyond its value as a training aid. Conceived in 1959 by David S. Gabriel of Lewis as a rig to test space equipment in three degrees of rotational and two degrees of linear freedom, the idea of concentric gimbaled cages was translated into hardware in the altitude wind tunnel early in 1959, when Lewis was assigned the job of testing Big Joe's attitude control system. Robert R. Miller directed the MASTIF project; Louis L. Corpas did the detail design work; and Frank Stenger developed the air-jet propulsion arrangement. Soon they had erected a tinker-toy-like rig 21 feet in diameter at its supporting yoke, capable of mounting a 3,000-pound space capsule inside its three sets of gimbals, and able to turn and tumble the whole combination in three axes simultaneously at 60 noisy revolutions per minute. An early trial revved the outer cage from zero to 50 revolutions per minute in half a turn." see This New Ocean