Debate Captains to the Rescue!

When I need my decisions made for me, I often consult fifteen year old girls.

MADISON, Connecticut (AP) -- A 15-year-old girl with a Web site, a summer of free time and an astronaut for a hero is trying to solve a 3-year-old dispute over one of NASA's earliest spacesuits.

The family of pioneering astronaut Gus Grissom has been trying to get NASA to give them .his 1961 Mercury spacesuit. NASA says the suit is government property and an artifact that should be kept at the Astronaut Hall of Fame in Florida.

Enter Amanda Meyer, space enthusiast and co-captain of her school's debate team. She believes she has a compromise and, after launching an Internet petition drive, has spent the summer writing and calling NASA, the Smithsonian Institution, Congress and anyone else she can think of.

Meyer says the government doesn't have to give up its claim to the suit but should loan it to the Gus Grissom Memorial, a museum in his hometown of Mitchell, Indiana.

"It just seems fair," Meyer said. "It should be in his museum because that's where he would want it."

I'm supposed to believe that a fifteen year old girl knows enough about Gus Grissom to be able to say unequivocally where he'd want his space suit displayed? I'm sorry if I come off as a heartless ass for even saying this, but this is the most ridiculous load of crap I've heard in a long time, and I read the BBC almost daily. Honestly!

Meyer heard about the dispute in February, after she sent Scott Grissom a copy of a school essay she wrote about his father. When Scott Grissom phoned, Amanda's mother was so excited she pulled Amanda out of school to return the call. Since that call, Meyer has worked to get the spacesuit moved.

"Gus Grissom is my hero," Meyer said. "I'd like to see his memory commemorated the way it should be."

As the school year waned, she pledged to spend summer on the issue. Through her Web site and petition drives outside a grocery store, she says she has collected about 2,000 signatures.

"She's persistent," said NASA spokesman George H. Diller.

I realize that she's only fifteen, but if a whole summer, a website, and sitting outside a grocery store only gets you two thousand signatures, people don't care. The bottom line is that, like the Apollo modules, the moon rocks, and everything else that went up on those missions, belongs to the government, not in someone's private collection. (Excepting personal items like pictures, wristwatches, et cetera, of course.)

Am I a fan of government seizures of property, like the guy whose family collection of letters to and from various Confederate leaders and officers was seized a week or two ago after he tried to auction it off? Of course not. That's not the situation here. The space suit is in the hands of the Federal Government, and specifically the Smithsonian. That's where it belongs, and as far as I'm concerned, some fifteen year old girl's essay about her "hero" Gus Grissom doesn't qualify her in any way to be the catalyst for changing that.