Villarreal Studios paint space helmets

By Alan Carman
The Imperial Republican
    Armando Villarreal and his crew have been busy this fall and now they had their third custom helmet debut last week for the Houston Cougars.
    On Oct. 3, Houston played the University of Central Florida, (UCF), in the space game. This game is referred to as the space game because both schools have deep historical connections to the American Space Program.
    Houston is home to NASA’s Johnson Space Center and Mission Control and UCF is located in Orlando Florida, where the Kennedy Space Center resides.
    Villarreal Studio’s was contracted to hand paint helmets, with a theme of GridIron Galaxy. There are 10 different helmet designs, depicting the sun, the eight planets and Pluto.
    The quantities of each different helmet goes down, the further the planet is from the sun.
    There were 45 helmets with the sun, 23 with Mercury, 19 Venus, 15 Earth, 10 Mars, 8 Jupiter, 5 Saturn, 4 Uranus, 3 Neptune and 1 Pluto.
    The school auctions off the helmets to school Alum to raise money to help support the athletic programs.
    On Friday night at the University of Houston Hall of Honor Gala, the Pluto helmet, worn by the starting QB for Houston, Conner Weigman, was auctioned off for a whopping $40,000.
    At halftime of Saturday’s game, Armando and Lora Villarreal were honored by the Houston team and presented an autographed Mars helmet that was autographed by the Artemis II Crew. Armando said he was pretty pumped about that.