How to Sew a Spacesuit

The Apollo Spacesuit is one of the most intricate garment ever assembled , right smart firmly to make than your last cos - drama project and nearly too difficult for even NASA . In his new book , Spacesuit : Fashioning Apollo , Nicholas de Monchaux shows how Playtex helped to put a homo on the moon .

When she arrived at ILC ’s [ International Latex Corporation ] spacesuit plant in 1965 or 1966 , likely transfer from making bandeau , girdle , or diaper back for Playtex , a new dressmaker would be greet by her shop class - level supervisor , and “ taught to sew again from scratch . ”

While the praxis of spacesuit stitching was in many way identical to tailor-make a brassiere or girdle — the sewing machine and patterned guide were identical — much of the process was , by comparison , out of this world . A garment assembly line manufactures to a tight margin , and a couture house even tight . The allowance prescribed for ILC ’s suit assembly line , however , was derived from NASA - mandate system engineering rule of thumb , and was much stricter than any normally convey to bear on a handcraft . NASA ’s standards pushed the very limits of the equipment used by ILC , as well as the very limits of the seamstress ’s own technique . The permissiveness appropriate — less than a sixty - fourth of an column inch in only one direction from the seam — think that yard after pace of fabric was sewn to an accuracy small-scale than the sewing needle ’s eye . To reach such precision , many woman used a limited pedal that , instead of starting and barricade the Singer ’s functioning , fired one stitch per footstep through the multiple layer of a wooing ’s aerofoil . For the hundreds of feet of seams in each suit , this meant venturing stitch by tiny stitch across the length of a football game bailiwick , with a single trip leading to a discarded suit .

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At the same time ILC ’s needlewoman were being ask to meet unprecedented preciseness , they were denied the traditional prick used to maintain sewing accuracy — peg and other fasteners . To a garment whose reliability depended on an impermeable rubber bladder , mechanically skillful aids like pins were an inherently risky proffer . In 1967 , after a exclusive pin was happen upon between the layers of a causa image , an X - ray auto was installed on the shop floor to regularly scan the suit of clothes for errant fasteners . particularly thereafter , the use of pins was highly discouraged and , where leave , highly regulated . The most valued sempstress were those like Roberta Pilkenton , who could sew together the kayoed Thermal Micrometeoroid Garment ’s ( TMG ) 17 homocentric layers , with hundreds of yards of seam , without a single tool except her own guiding fingers . Those who persisted with pins as an economic aid to assembly were necessitate to control out a numbered set from a executive program at the beginning and final stage of their shift , each report for daily . Those flouting such regulations and bring special pins from habitation could , notoriously , find oneself one of them prick up into their backside by an irate supervisor .

If the precision involved in sewing concentrical courtship layers seems fastidious , then the undertaking facing the “ gluers ” — who assembled each bed of the suit ’s concentric surfaces together before final sewing — was even more finicky . Layering flexible latex , and whisper - thin layer of Mylar , Dacron , and Kapton , they used paintbrush and specially formulated glue to assemble diaphanous sheets into man - shaped assemblies . The tolerance for assembly was no more than the heaviness of a single Mylar layer . Each of the 16 glue - assembled layers needed not just to fit the astronaut ’s soundbox shape , but , like bird in a Russian matrushka , to be infinitesimally larger than the stratum it moderate . Any visitant to ILC ’s Dover industrial plant — or the new Frederica , Delaware facility into which operations expand in 1966 — could notice the care and craftsmanship of those who paste and sewed the A7L ’s layers together . What they could not freely discover , however , was the most close guarded guile of ILC ’s suit gathering process , the “ dipping ” of layer of golosh to form the rib sections , or “ convolutes ” ; it was these assembly that give ILC ’s case its essential mobility . The “ Bucephela albeola ” who accomplished this labor were , like their colleagues behind sewing machines , using skills found elsewhere in the Playtex organization . Until 1966 , pipes of liquified latex ran to the dipping way from the same army tank render girdle and bra assembly crinkle . As with the rest of ILC ’s assembly workers , however , their skills were brought to an extraordinary grade of craft and precision .

The elaborate craft of assembling a convolute started with a collapsible formwork around which layers of natural rubber were formed through repeated baths in a rubber-base paint - Br intermixture . Into this layered Earth’s surface were plant the caterpillar - comparable restraining ring , which allowed the convolute to retain its shape along the arm or leg ’s axis when several pound of imperativeness inflated the suit against a void . Imbedded above and below the restraining ring was a slender layer of nylon tricot - the same cloth that formed Playtex ’s brassiere . The vaporous fabric , imbedded in the golosh , allowed the convolute to be flexible while pressurized , without ballooning in volume . This ticklish assembly had been the key to ILC ’s wooing blueprint since the early sixties , and its evenly delicate manufacture was the party ’s most intimately guarded industrial arcanum . Even so , it was more a craft than a science , and only three or four employee had the good “ touch ” to consistently produce operable component part .

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In retrospect , however , ILC ’s unequaled accomplishment seems to have break beyond these individual crafts , and into the ticklish nontextual matter of their collective synthesis . Crucial to this tumid success seems to have been the professional respect consort to , and hardheaded collaborationism engaged in with , ILC ’s craftswomen . Indeed , some of ILC ’s most efficient engineers , such as Robert Wise , took hebdomad of stitchery lessons from the seamstress to well interpret how fingers , fabric , and thread interact to make up the suits ’ complex assemblies . And the craftswomen were provide , and even encouraged , to paint a picture betterment in procedures and assemblies as they were continually developed .

Emblematic of this polish were the late - night collaboration between dressmaker Eleanor Foraker ( deplumate from Playtex ’s diaper cover assembly line in 1964 ) and Leonard ( Lenny ) Sheperd , project head of Apollo causa development for ILC . Striving to fit deadline after deadline , Foraker would often be sewing lately into the night at the Dover plant . In the terminal stage of a courting ’s manufacture , the multilayered , human being - work assembly could not be close down or squashed into a normal stitching machine , and alternatively had to be sewed on one of two Singer machines — dub “ gravid Moe and “ Sweet Sue ” — modified to have an elongated subdivision and massive sewing bottom so an entire suit could be affect under its acerate leaf . For each of these early deadline , Sheperd himself would stay up with Foraker , help to slip and turn out the causa during the final stages of forum , and quiz the dressmaker on her proficiency and expertise . ( The moment would be kindred to Simon Ramo or Dean Wooldridge of Thompson - Ramo - Wooldridge [ TRW ] assisting in the soldering of a steering scheme circuit board . ) And yet , even as ILC managed to integrate technique and technology within its own corporate dead body , it proved enduringly incapable of fully adapting to the organizational atmosphere of Apollo . The most prominent failures hem in the procedure of systems direction , initiate by Ramo and Wooldridge with Bernard Schriever in the ICBM programs of the 1950s , and translated straight to NASA .

From the time of its June 1965 victory over Hamilton Standard , to well into the first flights of Apollo ballistic capsule in 1968 , these problems taxed the patience of NASA managers even as they lead to a series of important shop class - floor version on the part of ILC .

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Nicholas de Monchaux is an designer and urbanist focalize on issues of nature , engineering , and the metropolis . He welcome his B.A. in 1995 , with distinction in Architecture , from Yale University , and his Professional Degree ( M.Arch . ) from Princeton University in 1999 . Since 2006 , he has been Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Berkeley .

Spacesuit : Fashioning Apollo is available fromAmazon.com

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