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Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo cover art

Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

By: Nicholas de Monchaux
Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
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Summary

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: 21 layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This book is the story of that spacesuit. It is a story of the triumph over the military-industrial complex by the International Latex Corporation, best known by its consumer brand of "Playtex" - a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics.

Playtex's spacesuit went up against hard armor-like spacesuits designed by military contractors and favored by NASA's engineers. It was only when those attempts failed - when traditional engineering firms could not integrate the body into mission requirements - that Playtex, with its intimate expertise, got the job.

In Spacesuit, Nicholas de Monchaux tells the story of the 21-layer spacesuit in 21 chapters addressing 21 topics relevant to the suit, the body, and the technology of the 20th century. He touches, among other things, on 18th-century androids, Christian Dior's New Look, Atlas missiles, cybernetics and cyborgs, latex, JFK's carefully cultivated image, the CBS lunar broadcast soundstage, NASA's Mission Control, and the applications of Apollo-style engineering to city planning. The 21-layer spacesuit, de Monchaux argues, offers an object lesson. It tells us about redundancy and interdependence and about the distinctions between natural and man-made complexity; it teaches us to know the virtues of adaptation and to see the future as a set of possibilities rather than a scripted scenario.

©2011 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2014 Audible Inc.

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Surprising history & production of a space suit

This title has a contrivance at its heart - the chapters are set out in the same number as the layers in the titular suit and there are some pretty theoretical bits of social and design theory.

However, if you are interested in Apollo, the space race, science and technology or the complexities of complex technical garment design and production, this title will have something for all of you.

I found it generally fascinating and even the slightly heavy going bits couldn't put me off. It covers the technical landscape of the time - looking at contemporary design theories, the NASA environment,, the bureaucracy, the testing challenges and other manufacturers approaches, the inspiration of design, the persistence of Platex (who actually made the suit - which I wasn't aware of) and their completely different philosophy which made their suits so successful.

It is well narrated and I found it a mostly easy listen while travelling and walking to work. I learnt a lot, and while it could have been written in a more popular science style, some of the depth and breadth would have to be left out. Stick with it and you'll learn a lot (at least I did).

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Pleasently Surprised

I am over half of the book, the book's timeline is per topic, and doesn't follow the chapters necessarily, but that's not a bad thing, as a capable listener, you'll be able to piece in the parts to create a full image, the craziest idea was developing cyborgs to travel to space, yes, NASA wanted to cut people up and modify them to become cyborgs, it is intense to just develop the technology for space travel, nevermind the actual spacesuit design.

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Interesting book but a little diffuse.

There are a great deal of interesting facts in this book, however, the connection between some of them and the Apollo spacesuits are rather tenuous. That said, where the narrative relates more closely to its subject the author gives a new slant to the story of the design and development of the Apollo suits, why the soft shell Playtex produced suit was superior to the hard shell competition and so-on.

Those parts of the book were fascinating, unfortunately the other parts, whilst interesting, just didn't grab me so much. My other disappointment was the lack of detail on the actual makeup of the suits themselves. The fact they had 21 layers is right up there but what is never discussed is what most of those layers were and what their function was. I'd have liked even a quick run through as a minimum.

That said there were some stand out moments in the book not the least of which was one of the pitches Playtex made, no paper, no slides, just a short film of a man in one of their suits running around a football pitch alongside an unsuited man, throwing a ball, jumping, etc and generally doing things a man in a hard shell suit could never hope to manage.

Overall, a good book but could have been a great one. The narrator on the other hand was excellent!

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