Apollo 11 spacesuit was made by a bra manufacturer

boing
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Len Shepard, a physicist and brilliant electronic engineer, was one of the principal designers at Playtex. As a child, I once accompanied Len and my father on a trip to the local hospital, late one night, to test samples of space-suit material; we “borrowed” the hospital’s x-ray machine for the purpose. Another of the engineers once attempted to test the space-suit FCM (Fecal Containment Module) while hanging upside down. The results were, shall we say, unfortunate.

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Ok - I didn’t have time to look it up - but I just refreshed my memory on the subject.

Raytheon made the rope memory, using engineers at first. But everything they made was shit, so they hired women from textile factories and watch makers, who possessed the fine motor skills to deal with the delicate material.

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“Moon machines” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY_4vSmPMy0 perhaps?

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The constant volume joint was around long before this version. Robert A. Heinlein mentioned them in Have Spacesuit - Will Travel which was published in 1958.

The background of that story reveals an interesting bit about how science and science fiction intersect. Heinlein knew so much about pressure suits because during WWII he worked in a lab developing them for pilots.

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Does this mean we can’t return to the moon because all the bras are made in China now?

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I guess they need them for their own space program. They want to go to the moon, and I think they will.

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My uncle was one of the engineers that designed the suit. The names of all the engineers who designed the suit were listed on a plaque that was supposed to go to the moon on Apollo 13 which never made it to the moon and neither did the plaque

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That is both cool and sad. But the suits did help a lot to save the crew and I guess the guys who designed them knew that. Still, a plaque on the moon - I’m totally biased on this subject but I think engineers don’t get the appreciation their work deserves, so a plaque on the moon would have been awesome.

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