Reddit reviews Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (The MIT Press)
We found 5 Reddit comments about Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (The MIT Press). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
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If you want to know more about the A7L space suit development I recommend reading this . I was expecting more engineering/technical information, but the political and orginizational history of the space suit development was still fascinating.
Spacesuit: Fashoining Apollo also has this anecdote and everything you'd want to know about the development of spacesuits.
It's a fascinating story, but it's not like NASA called the International Latex Company (Playtex) out of the blue a couple of weeks before the project and asked for a spacesuit.
Forgive me for any slightly mangled details. It's been awhile.
ILS (again, Playtex) won the contract for the Apollo suits in '62, but was forced to work as a sort of subsidiary of Hamilton Standard for three years. Hamilton didn't trust them to do the job so made it's own suit, submitted it in '65 and it was horrible. They blamed ILS and ILS lost it's contract.
NASA, not having a suit, threw an open competition. ILS engineers broke into their old offices at Hamilton, stole their designs back and designed a brand new suit over the course of weeks. It was the only competitor whose suit both fit through the door of the Apollo command module and didn't burst.
For more info, there's Fashioning Apollo (I haven't read it, but I've heard good things), and Moon Machines part five (really good).
If you want to get into the technical aspects, this was suggested to me by Ted Southern when I asked him about glove design: AAS History Series, Volume 24. I got the paperback for thirty bucks. It's $2000 now for some reason.
Just got done reading Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, this reminded me of an anecdote in there. The silver on the Mercury spacesuits was largely just to make it look cool. The actual spacesuits were military drab, similar to flight suits of the day.
This kind of stuff has been going on for maybe 60, 70 years now. And I'd highly recommend Spacesuit to anyone interested in how the media played a huge role in the Space Race.
They had this link in the "about" section of the youtube video.