Until very recently I wasn’t aware that NASA’s Gemini astronauts were issued with switchblades for emergency use, it’s likely that the knives were intended to be used in the result of a crash landing in a forest or jungle rather than the ocean as planned. Soviet cosmonauts from the same era were issued with machetes for much the same reason.
The knife you see here spent 25 hours and 52 minutes in space on the Gemini 6 mission in late 1965, it was made by Camilus of New York and it still bears it original NASA serial numbers and documentation. If you’d like to read more about it or register to bid on it you can click here to visit RR Auction.
Ben Branch has had his work featured on CNN, Popular Mechanics, the official Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, 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 millions of readers around the world and hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
Karesuando is a Swedish foundry located 250 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, inline with the centre of Greenland or the northernmost regions of Canada. The village was originally settled in 1670 and it’s been occupied ever since, Reindeer husbandry is the primary local industry, with Karesuando falling within the Könkämä reindeer-herding region. The…
The new REV’IT Tracer Air Riding Shirt has a main chassis of heavy-duty PWR mesh – a tightly woven mesh that looks like a solid textile, but it allows air to move through it freely. It has low-profile CE level 1 armor in the elbows and shoulders to absorb impacts, and there’s a pocket for…
The new Roue TPS chronograph was developed specifically to offer all the benefits of a modern wristwatch, with the styling cues of traditional racing chronographs from the ’60s and ’70s. The key to the runaway success of Roue has been their ability to offer watches like the TPS, that look like they should cost thousands…
The Black Rider Daypack by Angry Lane is a unique motorcycle backpack designed with both daily practicality as well as security in mind. Each pack features patented anti-theft Pacsafe Technology™, a 360 eXomesh locking system that is embedded between the outside layer and the inside layer of the bag. This 360 eXomesh system completely envelops…
The Marshall Stanmore is the British company’s flagship multi-room home entertainment speaker, it can be plugged into a flatscreen TV to upgrade your audio experience, it can play directly from your turntable or CD player, and it can also operate over bluetooth from any mobile device. Marshall famously has decades of experience building some of…
This film from 1950 was created to give Americans a look into what it was like to fly on the then-new Pan American Boeing 377 Stratocruiser. The Stratocruiser was an advanced aircraft for its time, it featured a pressurised cabin, two floors of seating for passengers, and it could carry up to 100 people. The…
