

Neil Armstrong’s Spacesuit Was Made by a Bra Manufacturer - danso
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Neil-Armstrongs-Spacesuit-Was-Made-by-a-Bra-Manufacturer-228875531.html

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chernevik
For a truly outstanding book on the history of the design and manufacture of
the space suits, see "Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo" by Nicholas de de
Monchaux. It touches on interface as an aspect of the problem, and the
industrial process of making and validating a proper space suit.

It turns out that making a space suit is a really hard problem -- and that
"obvious" solutions, like hard jointed hard bodies, don't work. One of the
keys to getting the suits was the sewing skills of the seamstresses, who
sometimes had to stitch to tolerances smaller than the needles they worked
with.

I don't remember the book as well as I like, I think another theme was the
necessity of going outside NASA's manufacture and documentation protocols
because the handmade manufacture process at the center of it all wouldn't fit.
For all of NASA's emphasis on planning and documentation and process, the
equipment actually on the astronauts was essentially an enormous craft project
of hundreds of dedicated people.

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Wingman4l7
Even with a project like constructing custom space suits, you can still have
rigorous controls. For instance, they kept track of the count of sewing pins
used to ensure none of them were left in the suit -- and all the pins used in
assembly had colored heads, with a different color assigned to each
seamstress.

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NaOH
This is another good time to remind those interested in the Apollo missions
that the Moon Machines series provides a great look at the non-astronaut
people and work that went into the effort.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1203167](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1203167)

[http://www.amazon.com/Moon-Machines-Robert-
Seamans/dp/B0026I...](http://www.amazon.com/Moon-Machines-Robert-
Seamans/dp/B0026IQTR2)

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Wingman4l7
I cannot recommend the _Moon Machines_ series enough. There was a whole
45-minute episode just on the space suit; it goes over in detail the how & why
Playtex got the contract. It's got interviews with people who worked on the
project, testing footage I've never seen elsewhere, and some great anecdotes
as well. It really gets down into the nitty-gritty design challenges they
faced -- it's the Apollo program as the engineers saw it, not the astronauts.

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triplesec
The documentary on the background of the planning, design, construction and
making of Baumgartner's stratosphere jump has some excellent background on
making space suits. I saw it on the haunted fishtank, but I think it's this
one, though I haven't checked the video itself
[http://stratos.rdioexclusives.com/landing](http://stratos.rdioexclusives.com/landing)

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gxela
For some wild reason this just makes sense.

