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Outlier2 -> RE: Space stuff (3/25/2011 2:33:49 PM)
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~FR~
Science Friday today had an interview with the author of a new book about
the Spacesuit. There is a fun 2 min video on the site.
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201103256
The space suit was made by PLAYTEX, the same people who make bras.
"Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo
by Nicholas de Monchaux
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This book is the story of those spacesuits. It is a story of the Playtex Corporation’s triumph over the military-industrial complex—a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics.
Playtex’s spacesuit went up against hard armor-like spacesuits designed by military contractors and favored by NASA’s engineers. It was only when those suits failed—when traditional engineering firms could not integrate the body into mission requirements—that Playtex, with its intimate expertise, got the job. In Spacesuit, Nicholas de Monchaux tells the story of the twenty-one-layer spacesuit in twenty-one chapters addressing twenty-one topics relevant to the suit, the body, and the technology of the twentieth century."
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