Nothalogh

I doubt that

If only that's how bad things truly were. It's worse, way worse. That style of testing lengthens the development stage for a program, thus allowing an increased rate of money harvesting for the contractor, with a lower rate of being expected to actually deliver anything of value and meaningful performance. Why build something that works, when you can make ten times as much money making something that never has to work?

And at some point, you've just gotta accept that yes there is risk, even in an airliner, specifically during certain flight regimes. There is, today, a culture of unserious safety-consciousness, where everyone has become risk averse to the point of absurdity and for all of the wrong reasons. Von Braun would have told most of these kind of people to simply get lost.

Sounds like a wonderful household tool

Bureaucracy works like the old fable of Happy Jack. Take contextual lesson learned from last failure, and apply it to new unrelated problem.

That's the portable cooling pack he's carrying, a portable dewar of LOX. The plane had an onboard LOX dewar that was used for crew cooling, and systems cooling. Cold GOX would flow throughout the suit, to approximate climate control, since the cabin had none, but pressure was applied mechanically via expansion tubes that constricted the fabric of the suit. I believe Frank covers the suit system, here. https://youtu.be/MGdxpqqsHl8

If I recall, the A-12 and SR-71 suits were done this way.

You'd better hope it doesn't, or it won't make it through the mag accelerator.

The atomic mass of whatever you are shoveling into the it, turning into plasma, and then magnetically accelerating out the rear. The lower the mass, the higher the ISP.

In the state of plasma, the electrons are otherwise indisposed, electrons do the bonding. If there is bonding going on in your plasma, you have FUSION, and that means your containment and cooling system is about to have a problem

Well any chemical reaction would have to occur after the plasma had condensed back to gas, which would be outside of your engine bell

At the cost of reduced specific impulse

Because the local environmental conditions of PLASMA tend to preclude chemical bonds forming at all. Where else will the toilet flush to?

I believe the LOX would just get immediately ionized and just join the outward flow of reaction mass, only being able to chemically combine with your fuel long after it has left the nozzle. The only net effect I can forsee is a lower ISP due to a higher molecular mass of the exhaust.

Launch/Entry suits generally aren't puffy, since you generally only wear them when seatbelted into a chair. They're not EVA suits, they're pressurized flight suits.