England: The Hunt For Hot Gold III

In the year of Pat Sajack's Lord 1875, in the month of June, the date being the eighth, the collective minds of those gathered by Her Majesty the Queen had finally decided on a proper plan for the craft that would take us all to the sun, and, to my dismay, it is not the craft that Fez and I designed, though it requires many of the same materials. Whereas our ship would be powered by the directed burning of methane produced by bovine, this new design was some gaudy monstrosity powered by some random chain of chemicals that I held absolutely no faith in, and it lacked any simple elegance that was produced by our original design. Would you, dear posterity, believe that one of our new colleagues insisted that when we had traveled a certain distance from the Earth that the air would actually run out? I am well aware that on mountain tops the air will become thin and difficult to breath in, but we are not going up a mountain, we are traversing the distance between the Earth and the Sun, in which there do not seem to be any mountains of sufficient height to make the air vanish completely. No, I would dismiss these wild ramblings as a sign of lunacy, and while they do not quite agree with my reasoning, every one else seems to agree with my decision in this matter.
There is a chance that the region between the Earth and Sun might be filled with Aether however, as Fez has mentioned just a short month ago, so, working with him and a few others, I have proposed a specially designed helmet to aid in the function of breathing. Naturally, such high minded men as those who will be joining us on this expedition can not simply walk around looking silly, especially not in front of each other, so a special suit has been proposed as well to match my helmet design, which i have included below.

The helmet shall be made of brass with rubber seals, and a smoked glass visor that we might the Sun without getting our eyes burned. Attached to a pump, the mask will pull in Aether through a vent on the left hand side, filter out the oxygen so that you can breath it, and pump the rest of the Aether out through an exhaust on the right hand side. Much like the modern diving suit, the actual pump will be powered by hand in a large contraption, connected to the various helmets by lengthy hoses. All the same, the pumping mechanism will be on sledges so that it can be moved around once we reach the surface of the Sun.

The suit will look similar to the fashionable and practical waistcoat-jacket-gloves combination that can be seen about London, subtly sewn together on the inside to prevent the parasites known to traverse the Aether from entering through the sleeves or pant leggings. To match the brass coloring, the suit will be made with cloth-of-gold designs etched into the stitching, the main coloration being light browns and beige.