NASA says gray tape.
You'll find some documents say duct tape, but here it was gray, transcript -
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/alsj/...
"space-age baling wire" I think is velcro
"good old-fashioned American gray tape"
https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/duct-tape-auto-...
The tape and its many varieties have many names. "Duct tape" is commonly used today, but was not as common then, and wasn't in the dictionary until part way through the Apollo program.
I learned about gaffer tape working on sets decades ago and the all the experienced gaffers had a couple of rolls of it on a rope loop hanging off their tool belt. White for labeling stuff with a Sharpie, black for securing or hiding stuff that might be on camera. I've had a similar loop on my tool pouch ever since because it's so useful. It's sold a lot of places but quality can vary. Studio supply houses only sell the top grade stuff.
Related: if you want the tapiest tape to ever tape, "bi-filament tape". It's sticky as hell, cannot be torn, and you can get it in 12in (or wider!) rolls.
An excellent description. Fiberglass reinforced, adhesive that's closer to a resin than a tape adhesive. You can use it like it's cargo strapping — around sharp corners, to reinforce things (product descriptions describe reinforcing steel drums with it), etc. — wild stuff.
I do not think there is a named for it in French, we call it the thick tape you can tear by hand :)
Lots of people assume that "duck" is actually the misunderstanding, and that it must be a slurring of "duct", but there's no history of using duck tape on ducts. It's the wrong tool for the job, and the wrong name for the material. I'm surprised to see that sources like the NYT and Wikipedia are using "duct tape" as the preferred term.
There is. Post-WWII the tape was marketed and sold by the Melvin A. Anderson Company for air ducting.
Present! Thanks for ruining my adulthood ;-)
The Cosmosphere's got a more impressive collection (though that Saturn V makes up a lot of ground for Huntsville) and the presentation is much better.
There's an OK zoo (great, adjusting for where it is, really) nearby, worth a stop if you're there with kids anyway, but not much else I know of in the area. It's weird that there's such a good museum so far from everything, including from the most-traveled highway through-routes for the state.
I'd also been to the Cosmosphere as a kid (the SR-71 in the lobby is how I recognized that one when I returned, haha, don't see that every day) and have been about three more times over the last 15 years, as an adult, and it's still great.
It was built near the most-traveled highway through-route in Kansas, considering it was originally established in 1962.
It's only a couple of miles from US-50. Much of US-50 aligns with the first transcontinental highway, the Lincoln Highway; and for much of the 20th century US-50 was one of the primary east-west highways. It looks like it currently skirts around Hutchinson, but I'd bet 50 years ago it passed directly through the middle of town, very close if not adjacent to the Cosmosphere.[1]
The construction of I-70 in Kansas started in the mid 1950s, but didn't completely cross Kansas until 1970. And it would have taken decades for development patterns to shift from the US-50 corridor to the I-70 corridor.
[1] At least as of 1939 it appears to pass directly through the downtown: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... (EDIT: 1962 map shows the same: https://www.ksdot.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/4727/638724...)
Neil Armstrong’s Museum in Wapakoneta, OH isn’t that much further away, but much smaller.
They have, IIRC, one of the Gemini capsules, but also some really cool demonstrations. It is worth it to time that and one of the Trinity test site tours if you're interested in nuclear history as well, then take a trip north to Albuquerque for the Nat'l Nuclear History Museum and (for the kids and kidlike adults) Explora is a neat little hands on museum.
As part of a race to do doing something previously impossible, they built the MVP, and when some random showstopper happened, they worked creatively within tight constraints, to succeed.
(I'm typing the text into Photoshop right now, like a quote, with my name, over an image of me looking like an inspirational keynote speaker, in hopes that my LinkedIn post image will be shared rather than unattributed copypasta.)
How Duct Tape Saved the Lives of the Apollo 13 Crew
toomuchtodo•8mo ago
https://airandspace.si.edu/support/wall-of-honor/robert-ed-s...
https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/hist...
https://www.msstate.edu/newsroom/article/2025/04/msu-remembe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_13_Mailbox_at_Miss...