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View of the metal reinforcement on the boot's heel.

Picture 1 of 2.

These metal sheaths do not appear to have been used on flight boots on the earlier Apollo missions. A page on the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal has a series of photos of Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 suit. There are two photos showing the heel of the one of his boots, without such metal reinforcements or any indication that they had ever been attached.

Careful examination of the boot heels of Irwin's Apollo 15 suit (displayed at the Udvar-Hazy Center) show less discoloration around the area which would have been covered by such reinforcements, as well as two small, round, dark areas corresponding to where screw holes would have been if the reinforcements had been installed at one time. The boots on Kerwin's Skylab suit and Weitz's Skylab suit both have such heel reinforcements, as well.

So, it's possible that the heel reinforcements were originally present but dropped from early mission boots, only to be added again. Alternatively, old boots such as these were used for testing and development purposes when experimenting with adding the heel reinforcements.