Full-size images of the US museum’s collection will go on tour next year. Henry Fountain reports.
STASHED in a Smithsonian storage building in a Washington DC suburb are some of the engineering wonders of the space race.
These marvels are far smaller than the towering rockets and streamlined spacecraft that took men into orbit and to the moon. Far softer, too. They are the spacesuits that kept the astronauts alive beyond Earth.
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Most of the National Air and Space Museum‘s collection of about 300 spacesuits is here in Suitland, Maryland, laid out five high on steel racks in a climate-controlled room. Each is protected by a sheet of muslin, giving the room the feel of a morgue.
There are Mercury suits like the one worn by Scott Carpenter, the fourth American in space, its iconic reflective coating coming off in spots.
There’s the Apollo 11 suit worn by Neil Armstrong, looking about as pristine as when he made his first small step on the moon in 1969, thanks to a cleaning job by NASA that, in retrospect, was ill advised because it damaged the suit’s materials.
Nearby lies Harrison Schmitt’s Apollo 17 outfit, still heavily coated in lunar grit.
There are many suits that never made it into space – projects such as the EX1-A, which had doughnut-shaped joints that allowed the wearer full limb movement; the AX-5, which looks like a space-age version of the Michelin Man; and the AES, covered almost entirely in fabric of woven stainless steel.
There are accessories, too: lunar booties with the same stainless-steel fabric on top; Manned Orbiting Laboratory gloves with sharkskin palms and sewn-in steel fingernails; long johns laced with plastic pipes, to water-cool the wearer; and box after box of headgear, including Armstrong’s gold-visored external helmet, once thought to have been left on the moon.
The spacesuits will be shown next year in a travelling exhibition of full-size photographs and X-ray images organised by the Smithsonian.
”A lot of it is engineering,” said Joseph Kosmo, a senior project engineer with NASA who has designed spacesuits for nearly 50 years. ”But a lot of it is art, too.”
At its most basic, a spacesuit is meant to perform two nearly incompatible functions: protect the astronaut from the harsh environment of space, and allow the wearer to manoeuvre and work comfortably.
”The emphasis is on trying to develop a very mobile system while pressurised,” said Mr Kosmo, who in 1961, fresh out of college with an aeronautical engineering degree, was asked if he’d be interested in a job described as working on ”spacesuits, whatever they are”.
A pressure suit – a rubber bladder and a sealed helmet – allows the astronaut to survive in the vacuum of space. ”When you pressurise it, it’s like working inside of a sausage,” said Joseph Kerwin, an astronaut aboard the Skylab mission in 1973 and the Apollo program ”suit guy” – the astronaut who worked most closely with spacesuit engineers – for several years before that.
”The whole trick in designing a spacesuit was to make it easier to move the joints inside that inflated balloon.”
So engineers, including Mr Kosmo, spent years using their knowledge of anatomy, movement and materials to develop better joints.
The first suits, for the solo Mercury flights from 1961 to ’63, were variations on military high-altitude flight suits, said Amanda Young, who spent 15 years organising the museum’s suit collection before retiring in 2009. The Mercury suits had only two layers – the pressure bladder and a nylon covering to protect it and help it keep its rough shape. Because the Mercury astronaut was crammed in his capsule, mobility was not an issue.
But with the first space-walks, in the two-astronaut Gemini flights in the mid-1960s, that changed, said Ms Young, the author ofSpacesuits, a book about the museum’s collection.
Besides requiring that the suits be pressurised, going outside the spacecraft exposed the astronaut to micrometeoroids – high-speed particles that could puncture a spacesuit – and to extremes of heat and cold. So more layers, of Dacron, Mylar and other polymer materials, were added for insulation.
When astronauts tried to work, they overheated. Air-cooling was inadequate, Mr Kosmo said, so water-cooled underwear was developed.
Kerwin said the long johns were a big success in the Apollo program. He described a conversation he had with Alan Bean, the fourth man to walk on the moon. Bean said he began to overheat so turned the knob on his coolant pack from low to medium – which felt ”like diving into a swimming pool”.
Walking on the moon carried the risk of falling and ripping something. So the Apollo suit had to be bulky, with about 20 layers.
NEW YORK TIMES
Source: smh.com.au
