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That's chemical protective gear designed to protect the ground crew against hydrazine or similarly hazardous vapors .

They were first developed in the 1960s for the Titan missiles, which use the chemically nasty (but room temperature) nitrogen tetroxide and Aerozine 50. See http://books.google.com/books?id=MdTZFu1fZ4AC&pg=PA186&lpg=P... for some of the history.

Here you can see the suits in use at the end of the Space Shuttle STS-1 mission: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=gYc... along with explanation by both the news and NASA commentators.

http://www.xcor.com/blog/category/thrusters/ and http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Engineering/Clean_Sp... are pictures of people in similar suits, in order to fuel spacecraft. I picked those to give commentary about how hazardous hydrazine is, and that there's a push to use alternative fuels.



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