To make a giant leap for mankind, NASA first had to make a proper suit that could take us there. This is the history of the American spacesuits that were used to explore the final frontier.
When Neil Armstrong took his first step upon the cratered, dusty surface of the moon, the only thing protecting him from battering rays of direct sunlight, space radiation, and shooting lunar particles was the meticulously designed spacesuit he’d donned.
“It’s very exciting to incorporate new ideas, but designing a spacesuit really is an iterative process. You don’t want to take new, bold, great risks at the expense of human life,” saysAny spacesuit is essentially a miniature spacecraft, designed first and foremost to provide its wearer connections to communications, life support, and bodily protection.from even EVA suits. Of course, they needed to shield astronauts from wildly extreme temperatures.
Engineers also needed the assurance that the materials they used worked well together. Earlier spacesuits combining brass zippers with rubber gaskets, for instance, unintentionally fueled their own degradation. Whenever new materials come in for manufacturing, engineers put them to the test, ranging from microscopic and X-ray inspections to shooting pellets at the fabrics. After making the actual spacesuit, manufacturers like ILC even hire human testers, whose jobs are to, “basically, give it a workout that it would get over its lifetime,” Lewis says. That includes flexes, lunges, and squats – the whole gamut.
“This isn’t that they’re all alike, but the essential operations of the suit are the same across the board,” Lewis explains.
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