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.
But before Armstrong stepped on the moon, the suit kept making rapid trips back and forth between Delaware and Houston. Experts took it down to Texas in a suitcase for testing before sending it back upstate for fixes – including swapping out a zipper, just two weeks before launch.
Designing the spacesuits that would eventually take humans into the hostile world outside of Earth’s atmosphere was far from easy. The famous suits that Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wore to the moon alone underwent multiple transfers of contractor ownership and testing failures before they were finally approved for use.
“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,” says Cathleen Lewis, curator of International Space Programs and Spacesuits at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.
Designing Spacesuits
Any spacesuit is essentially a miniature spacecraft, designed first and foremost to provide its wearer connections to communications, life support, and bodily protection.
Lunar spacesuits were decidedly unique from even EVA (extravehicular activity) suits. Of course, they needed to shield astronauts from wildly extreme temperatures. But they also needed strong boots that wouldn’t give way to the sharp lunar surface. They needed joint flexibility so astronauts could walk around and take scientific samples of this new world, and they needed portable life support backpacks. They even needed to shield the astronauts from tiny meteorite particles that shot at them 10 times faster than a bullet.
The First Spacesuits
The first people to enter space in the early 1960s, including Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and American astronaut Alan Shepard, weren’t actually wearing the bulky-looking suits of Apollo 11. Rather, their suits, according to Lewis, acted more like pressure suits, designed for emergency use only.
The first true spacesuits came a few years later, as ambitions rose to not just launch into space, but walk in it. These were the suits of cosmonaut Alexei Leonov and astronaut Edward White, colored blaring white to reflect off the incoming blast of solar radiation and sunlight.
“Both sides had tested these suits under the best simulated conditions that they could come up with here on Earth,” Lewis says. “But things change out in space.”
Making the Apollo Spacesuit
From this, NASA switched to a water-based system: essentially, long underwear stuffed with beverage tubing, forming a spaghetti-like system that delivered a constant temperature and flow of water throughout it.
The Apollo spacesuit consisted of over 20 different layers and 12 materials – including joints made of the same rubbery materials used in women’s underwear.
Most of the materials that went into the Apollo 11 suits were products that had already been invented and used long before space exploration began. That included materials like Teflon (which is commonly used in household products like nonstick pans), invented in 1938.
“Spacesuit engineers tend to be very conservative,” Lewis says. “This is an issue of preserving life, and they test their materials methodically.”
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Fabric and Materials of Spacesuits
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.
And while bullet-proof Kevlar is effective in protecting an astronaut against space particles zipping by, Lewis says it wasn’t enough to prevent astronauts’ gloves from slicing open on the sharp handholds of the International Space Station (ISS).
The tragic test mission of Apollo 1 alerted NASA to the fact that the suit fabric it was using at the time had a far too low melting point.
“They stick to what they know, and they stick to what works,” Lewis says. “They make iterative changes using new combinations of materials.”
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Testing NASA Spacesuits
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.
“It’s consistency and constant vigilance,” Lewis says. “It’s not as dramatic as somebody jumping into a spacesuit and just jumping out into space.”
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Making NASA Spacesuits Today
Now, as NASA prepares to send astronauts to the moon for the first time in over 50 years, it’s continuing to refine its suits using the lessons from our Space Age. It’s focusing on crafting suits that can adapt to fit and function on everyone, regardless of their sizes.
“This isn’t that they’re all alike, but the essential operations of the suit are the same across the board,” Lewis explains.
Another major challenge NASA is facing is mounting expenses. Those will continue to remain thorny as it navigates the market alongside new contractors, including Axiom and SpaceX.
But to Lewis, even simple challenges remain, down to the gloves astronauts wear. While NASA has solved the knifing issue, it has yet to create a glove that perfectly protects and insulates astronauts’ hands, while allowing them to move around freely. It’s a problem engineers have been trying to crack for generations.
“We haven’t figured out a way to replicate [into a spacesuit glove] what is so essential to us being human beings, and it is our ability to use our hands,” Lewis says. “Whether we’ll be able to do it, I don’t know. The magic of obtaining a material may still come.”