It’s always surprising to me how many people don’t know that the American Optical sunglasses worn by the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo astronauts are still being made and can be bought for a rather reasonable $39 USD.
They’re built to the same standards as the originals by the same company (American Optical) and they suit a far wider range of faces than the ubiquitous Ray-Ban Aviator design. AO sunglasses were standard military issue to all US fighter pilots and most if not all of them kept the same sunglasses when they were recruited by NASA throughout the ’50s and ’60s.
The above image: Pre-Moon Mission geology training with Neil Armstrong, Al Bean and Roger Chaffee.
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
