‘It is an ordinary man that will make this extraordinary journey. And ordinary men will make it possible. They’re making him a suit for strolling out on the moon. Something special. Cut not from fine woollens but from the best grade aluminum. The latest style in neoprene rubber, elastic web, plastic tubing, nylon, cheese cloth. Six layers in all, with pockets extra big for picking up moon stones… And here too, the months and years of planning, testing, experimenting, accepting this concept of design, rejecting that hypothesis… here too the long labour comes down to something you can touch. Something which can be glued, and sewed, and taped…’
NASA archive film about ILC Dover
One of the most famous photographs ever taken is of Buzz Aldrin standing in the Sea of Tranquillity. But we don’t really see ‘Buzz Aldrin’ at all. What we’re actually looking at is an engineered object. A piece of space hardware. At the time, the most advanced, expensive, technically challenging item of clothing ever devised and made. This is the A7-L* lunar excursion suit, made by ILC Dover: a division of the International Latex Corporation, later known as Playtex, best known for manufacturing women’s structured underwear. Perhaps the most iconic symbol of human endeavour, the most instantly recognizable suit of clothes ever made. The word suit doesn’t really do it justice – this is a wearable spacecraft, engineered to protect the ‘ordinary man’ from the extremes of the lunar surface. Twenty-one layers of new exotic materials engineered by the finest minds and stitched together by a production line of highly skilled seamstresses from Delaware, who before this had been stitching suitcases and boxing gloves: heroes of engineering and technology whose names are sadly overlooked, such as Michelle Tice, Julia Brown, Delema Austin, Delores Zeroles, Doris Boisey and Delema Comegys. The A7-L and Hamilton Standard life-support backpack that went with it became part of one of the defining images of the twentieth century.
SUITS OF ARMOUR
The complexity of the A7-L didn’t happen in a single evolutionary leap, but represents the entire history of human exploration, designed to protect the fragile human body from hostile forces. We can see its ancestors in the metal exoskeleton suits of armour, designed to withstand impact in battle. Then there are the Victorian diving suits with their brass helmets, lead boots and air hoses. And the woollen balaclavas of the polar explorers, with their wooden goggles with horizontal slits to protect against the cold and the brightness of the reflected sunlight on the ice. There are the dry suits and helmets of industrial divers, and the pressure suits and g-suits of pilots, all of which were engineered to take men and women to realms normally too extreme for humans to function.
A spacesuit must protect the wearer from any lack of atmospheric pressure and provide breathable air and remove carbon dioxide. It has to insulate against extreme variations in temperature and be strong enough to shield the body from the impacts of micrometeoroids – tiny pieces of space rock or dust whizzing about like bullets. It must also protect from radiation and sunlight glare, and be tough enough to withstand whatever abrasion comes its way. Our imaginations have evolved for space travel. Our bodies have some catching up to do.
UNDER PRESSURE
Down here on planet earth, natural selection has equipped us to live quite happily at the bottom of an ocean of air we call our atmosphere which, along with the earth’s magnetic field, protects us from much of what the universe throws at us. That atmosphere has weight, which we call air pressure. If you’re at sea level, hold your hand out and draw a one-inch square on your palm. Within that square you are holding a column of air that stretches from your hand up to space that weighs 14.7 pounds (psi or pounds per square inch). The higher you go, the thinner the air becomes and the pressure (weight of air) decreases as a result. If you go too high, you’ll run into problems.
The Armstrong Line* at 63,000 feet (19 km) is a demarcation line above which atmospheric pressure is so low that it’d be impossible to survive without a pressure suit. Up here water boils at 37°C (body temperature). The pressure is so low that your body’s fluids would simply boil away.*
Pilot William Rankin knows what that feels like, in what must rank as one of the worst days ever, and a salutary lesson in why you should always dress for your environment. At over 45,000 feet he was forced to eject without a pressure suit through the canopy of the pressurized cabin of his F-8U, exposing himself to an explosive decompression, and a sudden drop in temperature from 24°C to around -55°C in an instant. He vividly describes what the exposure to such a low pressure environment feels like:
‘It was nature’s cruellest torture, the screw and rack of space, the body crusher, the body stretcher, each second another turn of the screw, another wrench of the rack, another interminable shot of pain. Once I caught a horrified glimpse of my stomach, swollen as though I were in well advanced pregnancy. I had never known such savage pain. I was convinced I would not survive; no human could…’
Bleeding from his nose, ears and mouth he managed to survive the ordeal, despite on top of everything else ending up free-falling through a lightning storm.
Such explosive depressurization sealed the fate of the Russian crew of a Soyuz spacecraft in 1971, killing three cosmonauts who were asphyxiated in the descent module while returning to earth from the space station Salyut 1. They weren’t wearing spacesuits at all. Since that accident, all astronauts who fly on Soyuz wear the white with blue trim Sokol spacesuit – an emergency pressure suit – to prevent just such gruesome catastrophes.
Hypoxia, ebullism, anoxia – the list of bad things that will happen to you with exposure to low-pressure environments are well known to astronauts, flight surgeons and enthusiastic children with a morbid curiosity the world over. Sadly, the eye-bulging demise of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall on the Martian surface embellishes a popular myth: you won’t explode in the vacuum of space or on the low pressure Martian surface. Your strong stretchy skin and tissues will hold you all together. If you found yourself thrown out of a spacecraft, trying to hold your breath might seem like a smart move, but it will only rupture your lungs. The outlook is bad. Your death would be silent. There would be no last words. In the vacuum, you’ve got about ten seconds of consciousness to ponder the situation. Enough time to think a profound final thought. Something like ‘It’s all full of stars’ would be all you’d have time for, before the lights went out. And then in a minute or so you’d be gently smothered by a silent universe of chaos and indifference.
SPACESUIT HISTORY
The story of the spacesuit begins in earnest with the birth of aviation. For early pilots in open cockpits it was all about keeping warm, but new solutions were required the higher we climbed. Maverick pilot Wiley Post was famous for losing an eye (oil field accident) and a stint in prison (stealing a car), as well as becoming the first pilot to fly around the world solo in 1933 in his Lockheed Vega the Winnie Mae.
Not one to rest on his laurels, Post understood that he could fly even faster if he could access the jet stream – currents of fast-moving air which occur at around 50,000 feet. He was convinced that the future of aviation was up in the stratosphere, but was also well aware of the physiological problems involved in surviving there. Constructing a fully pressurized cockpit for his aircraft would be too heavy, complicated and expensive, and so he devised a solution: ‘My idea is to employ a suit, something like a diver’s outfit, which can be blown up with air or oxygen to the required pressure.’
Post sought the help of the B. F. Goodrich Company, famous for manufacturing car tyres. There he teamed up with Russell S. Colley, who had been interested in women’s fashion design, but was persuaded into an engineering career. He would become known as ‘the first tailor of the space age’.
In time-honoured tradition it took three attempts to get it right. The first two suits failed – the first one splitting apart under pressure, and for the second one Post had gained weight and had to be cut out of it. The third suit fitted perfectly and was pressurized enough to keep Post alive, while at the same time allowing him to maintain flexibility to control the aircraft. Too much air pumped into a suit will make it rigid – the more air you blow into a long modelling balloon, for example, the stiffer it becomes. Likewise with a spacesuit – over-inflation means the wearer has to put in more work to move around. It’s this trade-off between pressure versus flexibility that would become such an important engineering challenge to spacesuit design.
Seeing the component parts of what is essentially the very first spacesuit, you understand the basic design philosophy that underlines all the suits that followed: a cotton onesie for warmth and comfort, the strange-looking airtight rubberized inflatable bladder that looks like a human-shaped bicycle inner tube, the heavy canvas outer suit to stop the bladder ballooning, which has articulated joints, leather gloves, boots, and the aluminium helmet looking like a tin can with a porthole set slight off centre to compensate for Post’s missing eye. It’s a strangely disconcerting Heath-Robinson-esque outfit, straight out of an early science-fiction comic strip.
THE XH-5 TOMATO WORM SUIT
The many strange looking prototype suits that were to follow solved many engineering challenges, which in turn fed the imagination of post-war science-fiction writers and artists. The XH-5 B. F. Goodrich pressure suit of 1943 is a classic example. A major design innovation by Colley was inspired by watching a tomato worm caterpillar crawling along a branch, or so the story goes. How does a caterpillar bend its body without squashing itself? Colley noticed that as it moved along, its segmented body would contract at the bottom while expanding at the top, thus maintaining its internal volume. Imagine for a moment a drinking straw: if you bend it in half, creating a kink, the straw becomes useless. But a clever engineer* devised that bendy concertina section that allows the straw to flex, maintaining the internal volume just like the caterpillar. In spacesuit engineering, these bendy jointed sections are called convolutes, partially solving the problem of maintaining suit flexibility under pressure, whilst allowing astronauts to work.
Although Colley’s ‘tomato worm’ suit never flew in space, it did make it to the moon in Tintin’s Destination Moon in spectacular orange. It also came in a handy dog version.
New exotic materials were being considered for pressure suits, like Dacron, Mylar, Nomex, neoprene rubber, Kapton, Chromel-R and Beta cloth. The experimental X planes that would fly at hypersonic speeds at the ‘edge of space’ in the 1950s and 1960s required ever-more sophisticated outfits for the pilots. The young X-15 pilot Neil Armstrong wore the latest pressure suit made by the David Clark Company, which was to set the tone. What made it even more exciting was that it was silver.
SILVER SUITS
It was the Project Mercury suit design that really ushered in the space age. A suit that met all the technical challenges of space travel, as well as igniting the public imagination. Like Buck Rogers – commander of earth’s interplanetary battle fleets – they would be silver. Once again it was designed by Russell Colley and the B. F. Goodrich Company. The ‘aluminized’ silver colour came from an aluminium powder that was bonded onto the green nylon of the Navy Mark IV pressure suit, and was made by 3M (Minnesota, Mining and Manufacturing Company), which you probably know as the company that make that other engineered marvel of the twentieth century, the Post-it note.
The technical justification for the silver suit was UV reflection and various thermal properties, but the aesthetics are what’s important here. Silver elevated the astronaut to the status of a cultural icon. Ask anyone who’s wrapped themselves in acres of kitchen tinfoil as a child to create the same effect. They look beautiful, tailored and sleek. If you want a vintage spacesuit in your house, you want one of these.
If you look back at the famous Mercury 7 picture, you’ll notice that Deke Slayton and John Glenn’s boots are slightly different. Their custom-made boots weren’t ready in time for the famous Life magazine photoshoot, so they had to spray-paint a pair of ordinary black workboots silver.
SOKOL
For the last thirty years, the real workhorse spacesuit has been the Sokol (‘Falcon’) suit made by NPP Zvezda in Moscow. Every astronaut (including you) who flies in the Soyuz spacecraft wears one. It’s a soft nylon suit with integrated boots, hood and visor and a rubberized internal pressure bladder. It’s designed to be worn in a reclining position in the specially moulded seat, which is why they look a bit small when astronauts are walking in them. The glorious bit is how you seal the pressure bladder, which looks like a sort of thin rubberized sleeping bag that spills out of the front, and is what you climb into to put the suit on. Once you’re in, the opening is then pleated up and tied off with nothing more sophisticated than a rubber band. Like a pencil, a rubber band is cheap, and if it breaks, you can just grab another one.
With the gloves on and the visor closed, the suit can be inflated through the hose on the front just like a human-shaped balloon, protecting the astronaut from emergency depressurization.
EVA
On board the ISS there are two types of spacesuit for going outside: the rear-entry Orlan suit used by the Russians, and the American EMU (Extravehicular Mobility Unit) version made by ILC Dover, which are used by everyone else. There are two of these EMU suits permanently on board, which all the visiting astronauts use. In 2013, ESA Astronaut Luca Parmitano had a major issue when water from the cooling unit leaked inside his helmet while he was outside the station on an EVA.* You really don’t want this to happen. Luckily he was quickly back inside before the problem developed further.
There are wardrobe malfunctions, and then there’s the wardrobe malfunction of the first space walker Alexei Leonov. On 18 March 1965, he and cosmonaut Pavel Belyayev made it into orbit aboard Voskhod 2. Already, conditions on board were fearsome: overheating and claustrophobia, combined with motion sickness from the effect of weightlessness, had already set in. Any body movements in such a tiny space were almost impossible. Both were wearing the new Berkut spacesuit – technically similar to Gagarin’s orange SK-1 pressure suit, but made from a white outer fabric designed to reflect the solar radiation and finished with a smart red stripe down the leg and arm like a Soviet general’s uniform, providing a visual contrast.
It was time for Leonov to finally open the door and go outside, the first time any human had done so. In a spacecraft no bigger than a phone box, Leonov began the exhausting exit procedures. Like everything about this mission, how this new-fangled spacesuit would perform was unknown. It had been tested on earth but never in such an extreme environment. Belyayev deployed the airlock – a soft extendable tunnel that protruded outwards from the spacecraft. A corridor into the void joining two realms. With a slap on his back he sent Leonov on his way, who closed the hatch behind him, then slowly released the air from this flimsy airlock before opening the hatch at the other end. Leonov made his way to the exit rim almost unable to move in his cumbersome inflated suit and set up the movie camera, which was to record this historic moment. The whole of Africa lit up in front of him, filling his field of view. Breathing pure oxygen, he was attached by a five-metre long life-support line to the spacecraft.
If ever there was a metaphor for the birth of the space age this was it: Leonov free-floating like a foetus wrapped in a protective cocoon, tethered by an umbilical cord to the womb. ‘Caucasus! Caucasus! I see the Caucasus underneath!’ he declares over the radio, already exhausted from the exertion of trying to move in the suit. The countries of the world pass below him like a scrolling map. To his left the boot of Italy, and to his right the Black Sea. He hears nothing but his breathing and his beating heart. Like a newborn his movements are small and deliberate, conserving as much energy as possible, fighting against the pressure of the inflated suit.
Moving his arm to take a photograph using the camera attached to his chest he realizes he is in trouble. The suit had expanded too much, causing it to stiffen like an over-inflated balloon. This forces the gloves and boots away from his hands and feet. With nothing to push against in the vacuum, and unable to hold the tether, he is stranded, despite being only a couple of metres from the airlock.
The danger he’s in begins to dawn on him. He knows in five minutes the earth will move into shadow, which means total blackness as well as mind-numbing cold. Leonov begins frantically trying to get back to the airlock. The bulging suit is no longer tight around his body, making any movement useless. His gloveless fingers can no longer grasp. He tries to clamp his arms around the tether to pull himself nearer. Every movement is energy-sapping and generating heat. Sweat is pouring into his eyes, blinding him.
Eventually, managing to move towards to the airlock, he realizes he is physically too big to get back in. It is as futile as trying to get the toothpaste back into the tube. He has no choice but to release half the pressure of the suit using a manual valve, which he does in secret. Reducing the pressure so drastically might give him more flexibility and reduce his size, but he knows it could also kill him. Sure enough as Leonov struggled with the valve, and the oxygen seeped slowly out of the suit, he could feel death’s first gentle embrace – the telltale pins and needles creeping over his fingertips. But his decision does give him the increased flexibility he needs to get himself to safety, and head first he manages to force himself back inside the spacecraft…
He was suffering from exhaustion and dehydration and had lost 6kg of body weight in half an hour. But he was alive and ready to return to earth, a journey that almost ended in disaster: a spacecraft separation issue meant a ballistic re-entry, entering the atmosphere at too steep an angle exposing the cosmonauts to over 9-g and sending them wildly off course. They landed deep in the frozen wilderness of the Soviet Union and had to survive for several days waiting for rescue. Luck was on their side: they had survival training and a gun, which meant they could kill any of the wolves and bears living in the forests. But that’s another story.
RED PAINT
One of the defining visual images of the Soviet space program was the red CCCP (Cyrillic for USSR) filling the expanse of white on the helmet of Yuri Gagarin. This historic paint job was a last-minute decision, just a few hours before launch, as much for identification on landing as anything else. A Zvezda engineer named Victor Davidyantz was the man tasked with this important afterthought. Working against the clock, with a steady hand and nerves of steel, he inadvertently created a design classic that even got a feature in a William Hartnell Doctor Who episode. If you go to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, you can see one of Gagarin’s training suits and the signwriting handiwork up close. The red paint has been chipped away slightly, but the brushstrokes of the artist are clearly visible. The letters are ever so slightly varying in thickness, and as with any artefact where you can see the hand at work, you are instantly transported back in time. The red also provided good visual contrast for the cameras. Later versions of the famous Apollo moon suit, worn by the Commander during lunar EVAs, had a red stripe on the helmet and limbs for easier identification.
A BETTER MAN THAN ME
In 2015, a Kickstarter campaign ‘Reboot the Suit’ was set up to fund the restoration of Neil Armstrong’s historic moon suit, which is badly degrading after nearly fifty years. Nearly three quarters of a million dollars were raised almost immediately, so high is the spacesuit held in the public’s esteem. The spacesuits of the past have huge cultural importance, as well as holding valuable information while we consider what to wear as we journey further from earth. The majority of the American suits from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo era are now looked after by the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian. Going into the large pristine laboratory where some of the suit preservation and imaging work is being carried out is like walking into a morgue – human forms lie on metal gurneys covered by cotton shrouds. Under one is Al Shepard’s Project Mercury B. F. Goodrich suit, the aluminized silver coating beginning to fade and fall away.
In front of me like a corpse lies Charlie Duke’s Apollo 16 suit. An open zip reveals its various layers, like looking into the wound on the carcass of an animal. Every stitch and every stain tells a story, that began with a group of highly skilled women in the sewing rooms in Delaware, all the way to the mountains of Fra Mauro on the moon and back. I notice that the blue lining, just inside the red helmet neck ring, has discoloured – a mysterious darker patch, as if he’d been drooling. What could it be? A couple of years later, I come across the name ‘Gunga Din’ – the title of a Rudyard Kipling poem about an Indian water-bearer who saves the life of an English soldier. Gunga Din was also the nickname the suit engineers gave for a specifically designed drinking pouch that attached right by that spot in the suit. It turns out that Tang, the soft drink that Charlie had in this pouch, had leaked out during one of his lunar EVAs, causing the helmet locking mechanism to jam.
Through the microscope we peer back in time, deep into the texture of the fabric. The weave of the individual fibres stained grey from the moon dust, with grit embedded between them like boulders strewn across a landscape. Some of the fibres had snapped or been damaged by the abrasions. These suits were engineered to withstand everything that the universe could throw at them. Everything except time. The damage done by a few hours of wear and tear on the moon and a few decades of hibernation on earth has taken its toll, but gives us vital knowledge for the next generation of spacesuit designers.
Tho’ I’ve belted you and flayed you,
By the livin’ Gawd that made you,
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
Rudyard Kipling
SPACESUITS, THE NEXT GENERATION
‘She will not be bosomy because of the problems of designing pressure suits’
Look magazine, 2 February 1960, on what the first ‘space girl’ might be like
The next generation of spacesuits for the next generation of spacecraft are already being rolled out. They’ve got to be functional, practical, and importantly they’ve got to look bad-ass. Spacesuits sell the dream of space travel. The David Clark Company has manufactured the new ‘Boeing Blue’ suits, made for the Starliner spacecraft. Like the Soyuz’s white Sokol suit and the Space Shuttle’s pumpkin-orange Advanced Crew Escape Suit (ACES), this suit is designed for on-board emergencies during the critical launch and land phases. This new suit is much lighter and more flexible, with touchscreen sensitive gloves, an extra wide visor, and a soft integrated helmet like the Sokol.
NASA’s new Orion spacecraft will use a David Clark Company orange ACES suit, similar to the Space Shuttle suit, but modified (MACES) with a limited degree of EVA capability.
ESA GRAVITY LOADING COUNTERMEASURE SKINSUIT (GLCS)
Microgravity environments like the ISS, or year-long trips to Mars, will lead, among other things, to muscle wastage and mineral bone density loss. Without your body naturally working against gravity, your whole physiology will quickly deteriorate. The Skin Suit, which has already been tested on board the ISS, squeezes the body from the shoulders to the feet while the astronaut carries out their duties, to help overcome some of the damaging effects, specifically helping to prevent back pain caused by the lack of compression on the spine, which can make astronauts grow by a few inches during a long duration spaceflight.
EXTRAVEHICULAR
There’s no such thing as bad weather in space. Just the wrong spacesuit.
The suit you will wear to explore your planetary destination will have to be much more practical than anything built before. If you’re planning to be on Mars for a year in your spacesuit you’ll need vastly increased mobility and durability. It will have to last a long time – the Apollo A7-L moon suits were only used once, and for a matter of hours or days. The gravity of the planet will determine the weight of the suit. The current NASA EMU (Extravehicular Mobility Unit) suit used for spacewalks on the ISS weighs nothing at all up there, but a whopping 140 kg here on earth. Many new solutions are needed depending on where we’re going, for how long and what we’re going to do.
Professor Dava Newman, an astronautics engineer, and former NASA Deputy Administrator has been developing the BioSuit, a futuristic-looking Spiderman suit that works by using mechanical counter-pressure (a physical squeezing of the body) rather than the traditional ‘balloon-style’ gas-pressure suits. A suit like this would give the wearer a huge degree of flexibility. The idea is not new and was explored in the 1970s, but now a new world of materials and design techniques is making it possible.
ILC Dover in Delaware continue the gas-pressurized spacesuit theme, designing the next generation of lunar and Mars suits, using rigid, soft and hybrid designs, such as the prototype Z-2 suit.
If you’ve always wanted to put on a real spacesuit, you can try buying one (or bits of one) on eBay. Periodically Russian Sokol suits and Orlan EVA gloves appear from mysterious sources online, or occasionally they come up via more reputable auction houses. Even so, you’re talking about tens of thousands of dollars.
If you’re in Brooklyn, check out independent spacesuit manufacturers Final Frontier Design. It’s run by Ted Southern and former Zvezda Russian spacesuit engineer Nikolay Moiseev who set out on a mission to try to make a better spacesuit glove – traditionally one of the hardest components to get right. They have now set up a spacesuit design company to cater for the new world of space access. You can spend a couple of hours with them, going through a real suit-up procedure for $795.00.
* A = Apollo, 7 = the number in the series, L = the ‘L’ from the company name.
* Named after the aeromedical pioneer Harry George Armstrong.
* Just the exposed fluids like saliva and tears, not your blood.
* Joseph B. Friedman
* Extra-vehicular activity.
