Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (Mit Press)

Amazing book if you wonder about how the human body behaves and react in space. The details of 'private and mundane' physiological needs a human body requires to survive when taken away to an environment without gravity, without temperature controls, with restricted comforts for everyday bodily functions. All the experiments and research conducted to design an outfit and the expertise of the seamstresses who literally hand sewed and machine sewed the suits at that time.

As a certified space cadet I have read dozens of books about the history of space exploration and manned space flight, many more on aviation and astronomy. (I own a book, for example, called "Eject! The Complete History of U.S. Aircraft Escape Systems. Actually, it's pretty interesting.)Virtually all of these books, excepting Mailer's "Of a Fire on the Moon," of course, were written by the anointed for the choir. They focus narrowly, or not too broadly, anyway, on a specific subject and the straightforward tangents of that subject. Michael de Monchaux's "Spacesuit - Fashioning Apollo" was not written for this audience, and the difference is compelling and fascinating. De Monchaux is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley.Put succinctly, "Spacesuit - Fashioning Apollo" is the history of the spacesuit as a technology, specifically the Apollo spacesuit. To anyone who has explored the history of any technology - the photocopier, cell phone towers, bar codes, VCRs, etc., etc. - the gist that emerges quickly and throughout is how far back in time are the beginnings, and how divergent are the seminal paths that eventually merge to create this new thing. The beginnings of the Apollo spacesuit reach back to a Russian Jewish immigrant born in 1901, Abram Spanel. Spanel started the International Latex Corporation (ILC), better known as Playtex. Yep, the spacesuits that allowed moon-walking astronauts to survive were made by master seamstresses who had once made bras and girdles. Just imagine how this went over with the fighter jock personalities at NASA.But moreover, this book is a cultural treatise about clothing the human body. NASA basically did not want the suit ILC proposed, which was an actual garment. Most in NASA and the aerospace industry wanted to contain astronauts in hard, rigid suits (cans, really), not dress them in fabric. And yet, once all requirements were considered, ILC's concepts were chosen.Rather than simply dissect how the Apollo spacesuit came to be, de Monchaux explores a spectrum of cultural powers and movements that made such a device possible, but not necessarily inevitable. The narrative explains that the only way to develop a spacesuit that worked fully was to maintain the round peg of the human body as the square-hole concepts of engineering and bureaucracy evolved to accommodate that concept. The concepts for rigid suits came up short. Regarding Apollo, they came up short rather completely.This book is also an expose of the Cold War. Informed and inquisitive people have always known there were activities our democracy pursued that were far removed from our consuming, post-war suburban lives of ease and abundance. Even for the well educated, though, that knowledge tended to be cursory without the specific pursuit of a particular interest. Presented here both explicitly and implicitly is a window into the myriad of secret (or at least never publicized) programs, as well as the almost open-ended funding that paid for them.Further, this books is about The Sixties, perhaps the most American decade in a century that was already America's. As de Monchaux tells the story, the Apollo suit is really emblematic of a conterculture. ILC's informal engineers were self taught, with little if any college experience, details that rankled the quantitative, degree-strewn POV of NASA and aerospace bureaucracies. Although from a generation well before Woodstock, ILC engineers found implicitness out of explicitness, while also finding ways to satisfy the calculations and methodologies the bureaucracies needed as much as demanded.There is no doubt the initial purpose of Apollo, in 1961, was political, both domestically and internationally. As de Monchaux writes, "From the perspective of Kennedy's knowledge of the media's power in the cold war, the entire effort to go to the moon should be rightly understood as an elaborate apparatus for the production of a single television image. Kennedy approved plans to go to the moon because he - and perhaps particularly and peculiarly he - knew that the single image, however arduously achieved, could be magnified and extended globally, and, in an instant, change the world." There is also little doubt that for many, many space enthusiasts within NASA, the aerospace industry and the general world populace, by July 20, 1969 Apollo had evolved into an almost Renaissance-like quest in American culture that was at least transcendent. After all, fighter jocks don't become artists (Alan Bean) or poet/philosophers (Edgar Mitchell) without a life-altering experience.Of all the pieces of equipment an astronaut needs, his or her spacesuit is in many ways the most important, considering the failure of a suit's most basic concept will lead to an agonizing and quick death. De Monchaux has structured his book to reflect the 21 layers that were sewn and bonded together to make the Apollo suit. In a very real sense, the suit was not only composed of 21 layers of nylon and mylar and teflon, but also layers of imagination, determination and temerity - the same sort of audacity that pushed our ancestors out of the liquid realm of the sea into the much thinner fluid of our atmosphere, that propelled us into that sky, and then beyond.More than any system-within-the-system that emerged from this project, the Apollo spacesuit was likely the most incongruous - intuitive, not easily quantifiable, perhaps a genuine synthesis of art and science. How fitting that this piece of equipment preserved nakedness as much as could be (skinny dipping in the universe, if you will), and that it was the result not so much of if-then thinking as in asking "what if?"

As someone who has had a long term interest in the history of aerospace technology (especially as it relates to human factors, aerospace physiology and life support aspects), I was immediately drawn to this book upon learning of its recent release.Having recently been following the fascinating work astro-biophysics Professor Dava Newman is engaged in at MIT, developing her `BioSuit' concept (note: the `BioSuit' is a new conceptualisation of the somewhat old mechanical pressure suit principle, best known in applications used for military capstan partial pressure, high altitude suit assemblies, back in the 50s and 60s), I acquired a copy of de Monchaux's book driven by several motivations. Not least among these was curiosity about what uniquely different and `new' information could possibly be forthcoming on a subject so familiar to me, although I admit to also being interested in seeing if any of the somewhat obscure precursor research on Dr. Newman's work would be cited in it.In terms of the second motivation listed above, I was not terribly surprised to find very little about the mechanical (partial) pressure suit in de Monchaux's book, since his book is principally concerned with the origins and development of the full pressure Apollo Lunar Mission space suits. What did surprise me considerably was how extensively (and skillfully) the author drew in the more esoteric aspects of the Apollo suits' lineage, most particularly the strong associations the suits' origins have with the rising post-war (WWII) domestic sciences of elastomer and polymer materials technology. This is explored to a considerable extent in the book's revelations about how the post-war commercial fashion industry figured so significantly in the process of designing and constructing spacecrew protective garments for the US lunar program. While mention of women's brassieres and spacesuits in the same figurative breath may at first seem vaguely humorous, the two seemingly divergent items are in fact highly relevant to each other in the broader context of this story, as the author evidences.Of course, the author is an architect by academic study and occupational background and this fact is significant for its impact upon the whole manner and construct of de Monchaux's exposition, for he approaches the subject from a very, very different perspective than that characteristic of many other previously written works on this topic. In my experience, architects uniformly share (more than most) a profoundly broad sense of awareness of how things fit together contiguously to result in a suitably functional product intended for human use. Considering their special focus on the theories of design and construction that underlie human artifact technology, this shouldn't come to me as much of a surprise, but it did. I admit that at first I found myself a bit put off by what I initially perceived as an unnecessarily esoteric take on a technical subject I regard as quite familiar, but as I progressed through the book I found myself increasingly fascinated by the value of what soon emerges as a singularly `different' (and valuable) consideration of the subject in reference. Mindful of the modest novelty (to me, at least) of a professor of architecture writing a book on a potentially complex topic like the development of the Apollo Program's personal life support and human factors systems, my initial bias readily diminished as I read more of Monchaux's book.The author manages to cover much ground, a great amount of it previously only casually referenced in passing by other books about spacecraft human life support systems, but perhaps even more importantly for the reader, he has prepared an engaging, comprehensive and highly readable work on a subject that one could all too easily present from a highly technical standpoint. Although the idea of using the 21 discrete layers comprising the Apollo lunar suits as an inspiration for chapter numeration still strikes me as a bit awkward (i.e. referring to 'Chapter Seven' as 'Layer Seven'), it is an admittedly small complaint. For someone who is accustomed to considering the subject in a far more rigidly technical (and less esoteric) manner, the author's singularly unique approach to revealing the role elastomer and polymer technology has enabled development of the ubiquitous 'spacesuit' is both refreshing, fascinating and entire original.Perhaps a more substantial complaint would center on surprisingly incorrect information appearing on page 94. For an author who has done such an outstanding job referencing and documenting his core material on spacesuit development, he makes a rather astonishing error in the section headed `Knitting the future' when he repeatedly confuses the US Navy's D-558-2 `Skyrocket' with the US Air Force's very different Bell X-2 experimental rocket aircraft. Since this information is so very basic for anyone possessed of even the merest historical knowledge of the early 50s experimental research programs carried out at Edwards AFB, how an erudite and learned academic like de Monchaux could make such an incorrect transposition strains credibility somewhat.On the plus side, however, among the more gratifying aspects of 'Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo' is the relative wealth of information to be found on Wiley Post's pioneering efforts to develop a high-altitude full pressure suit back in the mid-1930s. While most people have at least heard mention of Post's work (or perhaps seen the third of his suits on display at the Smithsonian's NA&SM), there is a noteworthy paucity of actual detail on his work available in most current literature. Post's work is an important early chapter in the development of American high altitude pressure suits due to its association with the B.F. Goodrich Company and engineer Russell Colley, both entities of which figured prominently in subsequent pressure suit programs that ultimately led to the US Navy's final 1960s Mk.IV Model 3 full pressure suit (a modified version of which became the Project Mercury suit). Post was an amazing individual in his own right and the part he played in enabling US astronauts to set foot on the moon should not be overlooked or underemphasised.For me personally, one of the other most illuminating aspects of this book is the detailed background it provides on how post-war materials technology pioneered by ILC (AKA: `Playtex') for use in women's control undergarments evolved, forming the foundation (no pun intended, but it is rather appropriate!) of modern state-of-the-art spacecrew life support assemblies (spacesuits). Up to this time, this subject has never been delved into with such exhaustive detail. While most space scientists and aerospace technology people are generally familiar with the close association ILC and the David Clark Company have with life support equipment hardware development, few have any real knowledge of exactly how the commercial fashion origins of both companies expanded into aerospace life support systems applications. De Monchaux spans that gap in our knowledge database quite adequately.This is a book that may be appreciated by just about anyone, regardless of whether that reader has a highly technical background in the sciences or not. In tying everything skillfully together into a whole fabric of meaningful contextual relevance, de Monchaux's has succeeded handsomely in reaching the broadest potential audience. In my case, he has certainly also succeeded in broadening my own knowledge about certain aspects of life support history I might have not focused on so intensively.As a former Berkeley alumni and resident of the `Peoples Republic of Berkeley' for many years myself, I was greatly intrigued to learn that the author is an Assistant Professor on the UCB campus. Berkeley has traditionally been charged by a very heady atmosphere of intellectual creativity over past decades, conferred upon it by the presence of the university, and de Monchaux has clearly benefitted from his association with all that is so stimulating about Berkeley in its broadest cultural sense. In coming from a discipline such as architecture, the author shares that keenly prescient broader awareness of the human life experience shown by so many others in his principal field (Ayn Rand's use of architecture as a focal topic device in one of her books comes immediately to mind) and with his new book he has rather deftly given us an entirely new and fascinating look at a modern and long-stereotyped cultural icon, the `spacesuit'.This beautifully turned out book is well worth the price and belongs on the reference bookshelf of anyone engaged in the high altitude life support physiology sciences, but it will also provide an enjoyable read for more casual readers as well. The end notes are quite useful and cogent, although I did find some minor fault with the subject index at the end of the book (specifically in that it was not quite as detailed as I felt it could be, given the vast amount of existing information bearing on the subject of spacesuit development history).On a lighter note, I found the fact that the book's dust jacket is texturised with a rubbery tactility to be very helpful, since propping a book up to read against one's knee in a comfortable chair can be tedious: the surfactant-like texture helps hold the book in place (reducing slipping). Whether this was an intended effect or not is subject to conjecture, but given de Monchaux's ergonometically astute faculties and integrative omniscience, it might well be a deliberate expression of the architect's broader understandings of exactly how human beings interact with their artifacts!